“MSPs are improving by becoming more empathic, understanding a bit more about what the customer needs, looking into business processes to really get under the bonnet of the customers they are trying to service. It is not really the case anymore that people buy bits of tin, or software service, you buy into the managed service. Having an MSP to understand the business challenges even if the business does not understand them all themselves, is a real challenge. We are seeing that direction of travel and it is a really exciting time for managed services.
“We have seen some of our existing suppliers here today and talked about roadmaps and plans; we’ll spend some more time with them and really get down to the bits and pieces of our business so they can better serve us.
“The double-sided challenge is that, as the role of the MSP grows, not even the customers themselves know what they need, so the customer is travelling that way and the MSP is coming to meet them in the middle. This makes for exciting times. As the partnerships develop, perhaps by this time next year. it will be an even more interesting conference, when people really understand their businesses.
“The IT department has fundamentally changed. We will see a lot more IT outsourced, which is great news for MSPs. We will see the MSP even more than we do today as an extension of our own IT department and therein an extension of our business. We are outsourcing an increasingly significant part of our business.”
