A look back at the evolving trust in the MSP business model
Early MSPs were faced with a high degree of mistrust from the market. First of all, the failure of the application service provider market around the turn of the century made buyers wary of purchasing services that could disappear overnight....
Machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence
MSP platforms by nature, are ‘chatty.’ Data is being created, not only by the customers using the platform, but by the platform itself. Every device creates data, and it is generally held in some form of syslog data log. Some...
Don’t reinvent the wheel
Being an MSP means that you can provide services to your customers where you retain far more control than if you were an independent software vendor (ISV). ISVs who have on-premise software must provide support for implementations across a wide...
It’s a metadata world
As mentioned in a previous piece, it is critically important for an MSP to ensure that its services are adequately advertised to attract more customers. This can be through emails, paper-based adverts, or whatever, saying “this is what our service...
Shining light in the darkness: the need for advertising
The nightmare for any company is when they know that they have a great product, yet it just isn’t moving in the market because no one knows about it. The company knows that it needs to advertise what it does,...
The increased need for auditing
The best and the worst thing about modern IT platforms is that they are flexible and change can happen extremely rapidly. So, why do the same capabilities create such diametrically opposite issues?
When throttling is acceptable
I have previously written about how important it is to be flexible with customers, allowing the occasional traffic burst to go unnoticed – well, at least as far as the invoice is concerned. The problem is when that traffic burst...
The new normal – being more flexible as an MSP
How do you deal with customers who need variable resources? The ones who, for part of the day, or on a cyclic basis of once per week, month, or quarter, show a spike in usage of CPU, network, or storage...
High availability – table stakes or competitive advantage?
Cloud computing has been positioned as a means of providing a highly available platform at a low price. This is true, but only to an extent. We have seen that even big platforms, such as AWS and Google Cloud Platform,...
Competing with the big guys
As an MSP, it can be a bit daunting when looking around at the competitive market. Sure, there are other MSPs your size, doing pretty much the same things as you. It’s a case of competing on a peer level...
