MSPs Changing Roles: Managing Devices To Managing User Experience

By Bernadette Wilson

Alistair Forbes, general manager at GFI MAX, shares insights on how managed services providers (MSPs) can help their customers leverage cloud services while continuing to engage with those customers and solidifying their role as trusted business advisors.

Business Solutions: GFI MAX RemoteManagement now offers cloud management capabilities that can enable MSPs to shift from device management to user experience management. Do you see a demand among GFI MAX partners’ customers for this service?

Forbes: MSPs have been faced with the challenge of the shifting landscape of IT solutions used by their clients for some years now. Businesses of all sizes are adopting a mixture of solutions and, increasingly, they are cloud-based. Research conducted by GFI MAX and several other organizations shows that small- and medium-sized businesses still want to have a single point of responsibility for all of their IT services, and so the role of the MSP remains very relevant. While the MSP has traditionally been in more direct control of the delivery of those services using on-premise hardware and software products, the fragmentation that is occurring means that, for the MSPs customers, the experience of using the different solutions can become more disjointed, and they want to avoid this. They were not IT companies before the move to the cloud and they don’t want to become one in the cloud era — they still want to concentrate on running their businesses, and the value of the MSP is every bit as great in ensuring that they can do so.

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