I recently had the opportunity to talk to well-known channel CEO and all-around good guy Lester Keizer about the impact of Amazon’s entry into the managed services space and how it could potentially effect rank-and-file MSPs in the SMB market. From our conversation, I gathered he’s not too worried, believing that the typical small business customer is still looking for the “local touch” that the giants are unlikely to provide.
Fortune 2000 customers are Amazon’s stated play in the managed services space, at least for now, so Keizer’s take on the matter is pretty reasonable. That said, he is not suggesting the channel stand still. As co-founder and CEO of the hybrid cloud MSP, Business Continuity Technologies (BCT) in Las Vegas, he strongly maintains that today’s providers, and the channel in general, need to be adapting and retooling their businesses to survive in the future.
“Managed services are no longer just patching and remote management,” he said. “In our business, we provide customized help desk, vendor management and other offerings that position us as the tech-business partner. For the extra customers pay us, they have full service.”
Keizer contends, and I tend to agree, that it is incumbent upon MSPs to embrace all things cloud — while embedding business process consulting into their client offerings. As he puts it, they need to “transition from analog to digital providers.”
Case in point: He relates a story about one of BCT’s smaller customers who recently came to him with an IT request unrelated to the usual network or device issues. They wanted help tuning the company’s social media tools to boost the effectiveness of their advertising efforts. The request prompted Keizer to call on one of his junior employees, an individual well-versed in the idiosyncrasies of social media marketing and usage. “For this kind of engagement, my least-tenured social media person is more valuable than my network engineers,” he acknowledged.
And so it goes. New roles, skill sets, and the approaches to the customer are just a handful of the ways in which the overall channel game is changing – and going digital. Today, business offerings that span social media, cloud solutions consulting, and vertical industry expertise are big-ticket items customers are seeking. It’s no longer enough to just keep the network running or end-user devices glitch-free, although those duties of course remain valuable.
One area to consider: vendor management. This may not sound like a new offering to add to your business, but it’s increasingly important in the cloud era. As Keizer explains it in the context of his company, a vendor manager acts as the liaison between end customers and vendors/service providers they use. They focus on the potential travails of the cloud world, to be specific.
Case in point: when it comes to cloud solutions, many SMB clients provision on their own, which is one of the benefits some suppliers extol. But when things go wrong, and they do, cloud solutions can be a headache. Many SMBs have no idea whom to call to fix, nor, frankly, the time or patience for finding out. Channel firms are uniquely positioned to take this on, dealing with an array of telecom providers, SaaS ISVs, cloud vendors, etc., as a negotiator. Vendor management also includes vetting the right cloud solutions that map to an SMB’s business objectives and budget.
