Frank Colletti (N-able)
Within the storm of market and economic headwinds appear tailwinds for managed service providers (MSPs) to take advantage of – making them ever more relevant.
This is according to N-able executive vice president worldwide sales Frank Colletti, who recently visited Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) to connect with local partners.
He said that identifying region-specific challenges and opportunities for local partners is the most important aspect of operating a global business.
N-able chief technology officer Mike Adler emphasised the importance of the A/NZ region.
“[Locally] it’s a small space, there’s about 6000 MSPs right across New Zealand and Australia – it’s not a massive market, but from a service delivery perspective it’s one of the most advanced in terms of the adoption of new services,” Adler said.
“Australia and New Zealand SMBs deliver a high level of service and that puts a lot of pressure on these MSPs to be the best and make sure they’re delivering that offering at-scale to their customers.”
And, with IT spend only growing, Colletti is focused on harnessing opportunities to achieve both business and partner growth.
“When you look at IT spend growing at a little over 6 per cent … you get to a place where that’s a lot of opportunity for all partners to be able to grow,” he said.
“How do we help everyone in the room grow into that IT spend, because it represents an incredible opportunity for every participant … in our ecosystem.”
The MSP landscape has shifted, with MSPs now operating as “mini enterprises” that create a lot of value, Colletti continued.
“When you look at an MSP today, they’re sophisticated, they’re dealing with complex issues, their organisations are complex. They’re bringing in high talent and they’re competition with the enterprise in attracting talent as well,” he said.
“This is putting competitive pressures in small little regions for these various MSPs, but it’s creating a ton of wealth and it’s creating a lot of this enterprise value that we’re seeing in the MSP space, which I find fascinating.”
Colletti outlined three key challenge areas in which he sees market opportunity arising for MSPs, arising from roundtables and conversations with A/NZ partners.
The first of these market challenges where MSPs can thrive is cyber security.
With the rise of cyber threats and SMBs struggling to keep up with increasing compliance and insurance requirements, Colletti said organisations are increasingly leaning on professional support from IT partners.
Security requirements have rapidly shifted from antivirus to endpoint protection and now necessity to protect the entire environment with managed detection and response (MDR) offerings.
Because security is now so ubiquitous, the line between MSPs and managed security service providers (MSSPs) is becoming blurry, Colletti explained.
“We’re seeing a lot of MSPs offering MSSP type offerings, looking to bring in MDR type offerings,” he said.
“They’ve really been forced to deal with those types of cyber threats because of some of the local things that have happened in this marketplace [A/NZ] has really made it much more relevant and much more visible in the marketplace.”
The second market challenge is the labour shortage experienced by many industries. This has forced organisations and MSPs alike to streamline operations.
“What that’s done is forced the MSP to become much more efficient in terms of how they’re delivering their offering,” Colletti said.
Thirdly, cloud transformations continue to present a challenge for the market, particularly when combined with labour shortages.
“There’s millions and millions of devices that are on-premise type devices that need to be managed, but what’s happened is Microsoft has really change the game and really forced MSPs to start to manage their users,” Colletti said.
“MSPs have had to figure out – how do I manage the web of Microsoft, because Microsoft is very focused on an individual MSP and MSPs are focused on multiple SMBs. How do we bring that all together? They need technology to bring that all together.”
Adler explained how the labour shortage has forced process that has created successful structures for cloud practices for MSPs.
“Organisations have had to deal with cloud technologies … there’s a lot of complexity that goes into that[, and] it’s really been a very big challenge for IT firms of all sizes, let alone MSPs, to deal with these new cloud services,” Adler said.
“We all did it in sort of a rush over the last few years and now there’s this focus, driven by labour shortage but driven by a little bit of opportunity as well, to step back and see what’s working.”
These market challenges of cyber security, labour shortages and cloud transformations are where the MSPs that can recognise and ride the tailwinds will remain “relevant”, Colletti said.
“If they get out there and start talking to it, they become thought leaders,” he added.
