Richard Branson, one of the leading lights and innovators in the business world, has always been someone I’ve looked up to. One of his most famous mantras that has always rung true with me is, “There is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions in a way that serves the world and you.”
As an MSP, you get that and you can relate. You’ve put in the long hours to build your managed services business—and now you’re ready to take it to the next level.
The Cloud Opportunity Remains Strong Despite Unprecedented Times
Even with fluctuating global situations, the cloud service market will continue to grow, likely at a higher pace than expected. Fifty-nine percent of enterprises have reported they expect their cloud usage to be higher than planned, according to the Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report.
As more clients work remotely, your end customers require a greater amount of user support. More businesses are beginning to realize that their business continuity plans are not as robust as they once thought. This global crisis has been a massive wake-up call in which organizations are starting to see they have probably underinvested for crisis scenarios and need more support.
Now, more than ever, your expertise is needed and the onus is on assistance and enablement rather than selling. To continue to stay relevant in today’s economy and thrive in the years to come, here are four facts you need to face head-on:
- Yesterday’s approach to operations won’t do the trick in today’s climate: Are Excel sheets and Google docs your tools to manage ordering, provisioning, metering usage and invoicing? Unfortunately, this isn’t sustainable and you can’t afford to continue to build your business on a foundation of spreadsheets.
You won’t have longevity without investing in enterprise-grade data management tools and intelligent business automation that mitigate human error and free up resources.
- The demand for premium service is growing: The struggle is on for mid-market enterprises to define and manage the right arsenal of on-premises infrastructure and private and public cloud services that reduce IT expenditure and free up essential resources. As a result of this approach, they can focus on core business activities that drive growth in the most effective way possible.
This can only be accomplished when an enterprise can lean on a reliable and forward-thinking MSP as a growth partner for their organization. Therefore, enterprises will demand a premium level of service bundled with deep technical expertise and counsel.
Your experience and skills will be invaluable, but you won’t be able to deliver that level of service without access to a growing catalog of innovative cloud solutions. You’ll also need future-proof tools that can automate service provisioning, simplify and streamline billing, and provide an accurate read on usage.
- Customers need more remote work offerings—fast: Video conferencing, identity management, secure remote access, disaster recovery and other remote enablement and security solutions are in high demand. You need to ensure you can support your customers’ demands and their expectations of immediacy.
Therefore, it’s important to have access to a broad catalog of solutions with automated provisioning that integrates with your business systems.
- Innovation is now more important than ever: In such a fragmented industry, the competition is extremely fierce. Market consolidation is occurring, and it’s the innovative MSPs that are gaining the edge and claiming a larger piece of the pie. Over the years when dealing with customer problems, you’ve discovered and instituted creative solutions that you can always rely on.
Now is the time to bring this valuable intellectual property to market. Productize it. Monetize it. And add another new stream of revenue that differentiates your business to have an independent software vendor (ISV) component and enables you to scale.
If you’re just starting out or looking to grow your business, here are some essential questions to consider: What service or additional new services will you offer to clients? How will you make them see you as an indispensable extension of their team? How will you integrate intelligent business automation to scale services, broaden your reach and grow your market footprint?
If you would like to have a conversation about how CloudBlue can help you deliver 100+ vetted cloud solutions to customers, give the world access to your own IP and help you build a hybrid catalog to scale your services fast, we’d love to hear from you.
To learn more, contact us at together@cloudblue.com today.
