technologyreseller.co.uk ASK THE EXPERTS 27 continued... enhancing cloud services and their approach to AI in order to support the digital transformation of various end-use industries, mostly SMEs. Secondly, increasing usage of CRMs and Business Intelligence tools to enhance relationships with customers and improve understanding of industry trends. This is crucial for automating tasks and addressing R&D activities. All this does not happen without problems or critical issues. There are barriers that slow down and, in some cases, even derail this process within companies. Lack of skills and culture in ‘change management’ are challenges that can and should be addressed by MSPs. 3 Vendor consolidation Vendor consolidation is a perennial topic of discussion for MSPs. Sourcing multiple solutions from a single provider can help with automation and affordability, but at the risk of vendor lock-in and lower levels of innovation. The other option of sourcing best of breed solutions gives flexibility and more scope for differentiation but adds complexity and increases the management burden. The popularity of each approach waxes and wanes, but which way is the market moving in 2023? Robinder Koura, Director Channel Sales, EMEA, GoTo MSPs might traditionally have felt I’m going to get best of breed in each space and then put together my own customised solution as a way of showing their value, saying ‘I’m providing you with the best of everything in a combined, integrated offering’. That gave us lots of different choices, lots of niche software. I think we’re coming back the other way now. Vendor consolidation in the market inevitably means you’re going to have more solutions from one supplier. And MSPs today might see a lot more pros than cons of having more offerings from one supplier. They won’t have to do as much integration and there may be a better commercial model from that supplier. The downside is you may not be getting best of breed in each individual solution. You’re compromising that for the value of consolidation. I think it puts you at risk, as an MSP, if you’re reliant on one supplier. To use a stock analogy, you’re not as diversified so your risk is more in one area versus the reward of having that consolidation. In terms of product development, it may take longer to get new features from one supplier. Because they’re bigger, they devices, and the next wave of automation is going to involve collecting that data and analysing it. MSPs are going to have to leverage automation in order to analyse that much data so that they can be more predictive for the customer, so that they can say ‘to achieve your goals you are going to need a system to do this for you and you’re going to need to implement and bring this technology into your business’. The next wave of automation is going to enable businesses to do that and that’s how MSPs are going to future-proof themselves. About this time last year, we announced our ASIO platform and started building the things MSPs will need: we’ve got all of this great benchmarking data, operational maturity data that we can combine using our BrightGauge dashboards. We’ve integrated SentinelOne. We’ve integrated our SIEM into these dashboards, so we can say ‘we know cybersecurity is the priority; we’re going to enable you to be predictive with that’. Before, we had dozens of software solutions with different types of databases, different UIs, multiple ticketing systems embedded in all of them. Our vision is to unify all the great things we have in this platform so MSPs can leverage one ticketing service, one company and contact service, one authentication service and, being in the cloud, more computing power than they can get on prem so that they can take advantage of AI, machine learning, data collection and make that data work for them. Lorenzo Fiori, Marketing Manager, Nanosystems MSPs are investing in new services and product portfolio development while engaging in R&D activities to provide affordable yet reliable solutions to their customers. Their processes can be improved by working on different strategies. First, ...continued automating searches for exceptions – and getting a PSA and an RMM to work together. The power to automatically create tickets in the PSA and auto-remediate things using the RMM tool, and then log that, track that and report to the customer helps MSPs build a very scalable service delivery model, where they don’t have to increase the headcount overhead in their business to add more customers. Today, we see a lot of opportunity for MSPs to get more systems working together. This isn’t 2010 when you would just integrate an RMM tool and a PSA tool. MSPs are now using cybersecurity tools like SIEM, EDR, XDR, SOC; they’re using backup devices – and not every MSP is using just one backup solution, they’re using multiple solutions. The common tech stack right now is a PSA; an integration to an accounting system; a quoting tool – what we call CPQ: configure, price, quote; systems management (unified monitoring management, which will be the RMM tool, remote control); and a backup solution. Those are the five things we’ve been perfecting until a couple years ago. Now we’ve added the cybersecurity toolset, so there’s a complete tech stack to be had there. As we see people coming in with SIEM and XDR, extended detection and response, and perhaps adding some DNS monitoring, our message is if you’re adding this toolset, you’ve got to invest the time to ensure you are making the most of automation, because you don’t want to add tools that require extra headcount to manage and keep going. I see a lot of MSPs that, when choosing their vendors, don’t ask ‘do these integrate together and how do they integrate together?’. They start to take for granted what automation can do and then they get themselves into situations where the tools don’t integrate. Computing is expanding, there are more Greg Jones Datto Phil Sansom Barracuda MSP
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=