Blog | April 28, 2016

LOGICnow's O'Bray Provides State Of The MSP Market Address At ASCII Milwaukee

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By John Oncea, Editor

“The MSP market is growing, changing from a first generation MSP to a second generation MSP,” said Kelly O’Bray, Global Community Manager at LOGICnow, who presented expert market analysis before a packed house at the ASCII Success Summit in Milwaukee, WI. As a result of this growth, MSPs now have more predictability of service, budget reliability, and better control of resources.

O’Bray cited eight specific roles MSP play and how they are changing:

  • providing technical expertise is now providing service management
  • being IT focused is now being business focused
  • moving from network design, configuration, and installation to providing service vendor research and selection
  • product sourcing is transitioning to vendor management
  • infrastructure skills are now application skills
  • hardware integration is now service integration
  • you are no longer a recommender and implementer, you are a virtual CIO and service aggregator

But what is driving this growth? According to O’Bray, the need to improve security – a common theme at the ASCII Success Summit – is the number one factor. A proactive approach to IT problems, better uptime, access to newer technologies, and cost savings over in-house IT round out the top five reasons the MSP market is growing.

Cloud and mobility, unsurprisingly, are front of mind in the MSP space as well. “Of the cloud applications being used, analytics being number three was surprising,” O’Bray said. Business productivity was the top cloud application, followed by email.

“Why the cloud is gaining traction is no surprise – clients are driving it,” O’Bray said. “The same thing is happening with mobility and that’s both a huge opportunity and challenge. We have to learn how to address all of these things.”

O’Bray urged those not already operating as an MSP to strongly consider it, saying, “Millennials are driving this change, and the time is right to take advantage.” O’Bray cautioned it would be a process, however, and patience is needed. “Operational maturity starts at the beginning and goes through five stages, ending with you being an innovator.” Reaching innovator status means you:

  • have a mastery of TCMS and process management
  • add adjacencies to IT services
  • reach high satisfaction and low attrition
  • are predictable, stable, and flexible

It also means “doing things better to be better, and being able to charge more for those services,” said O’Bray. “You gain trusted advisor status and become part of the client’s team and, as a result,

develop better, longer-lasting relationships, and make more money.”

O’Bray went on to break down the ways MSP’s are charging for services, noting 31 percent charge by user consumption. Twenty-two percent charge a fixed recurring fee, 20 percent per user, and 19 percent vary charges by customer. Nine percent charge by device.

But what are MSPs charging for? According to O’Bray, 65 percent of companies look to MSPs to place greater emphasis on strategic consultancy and 45 percent want greater emphasis on tactical, technical problem resolution.

As for the future, and again this should come as no surprise, O’Bray said SMBs are looking for help with IT security an effectively managing and using data. “The security market is growing 15 percent year over year,” O’Bray said. “There are a whole bunch of bad people out there trying to do bad stuff to us. There is an average of 138 successful attacks per week, and 70 percent of breaches are going undetected. We need to be thinking in terms of layered security and taking proactive actions.”

The ASCII Success Summit – Milwaukee is being held April 27-28 at the Crowne Plaza Milwaukee Airport. It is one of nine solution provider-focused conferences ASCII will host in North America in 2016. For more information on ASCII, go to www.BSMinfo.com/go/InsideASCII.