By Gina Murphy 1

As more and more businesses migrate to the cloud, traditional resellers will have two choices or risk losing the business; partner with MSPs to help them expand their services or build out a cloud network/ecosystem. The combination of the MSP and reseller gives the enterprise customer a one stop shop.

Here are ten reasons why resellers should partner with MSPs to best benefit the end user as they move their applications to the cloud:

1. Extensive Cloud Vendor Relationships: MSPs have developed their own cloud ecosystems with technologies and other feature specific service providers. MSPs excel at vendor management as well as packaging services from multiple cloud service vendors that collectively create new functionality, but as a single service to the customer.

2. Efficient Operations: MSPs offer the lowest TCO when it comes to IT operations. As cloud experts, infrastructure and operations become a utility, the MSP will focus their premium skill sets on the business of cloud based applications with enhanced application functional support, integration, and data analytics.

3. Skilled at Large Cloud Deployments: MSPs regularly deal with large and/or complex application deployments. They are experts at understanding how the applications will run in various cloud environments and across multiple geographies. Because of their broad experience, MSPs comprehend the intricacies of what works and what doesn’t work that could easily be underestimated.  Customers shouldn’t underestimate the benefits of leveraging the knowledgebase of what an MSP has collected over years of experience.

4. Customization: MSPs understand that one size does not fit all and almost all cloud deployments require some level of service integration and customization. Unlike pure play IaaS, MSPs are skilled at mass customization and expect to customize components of every deployment as well as offer a full range of professional services to support it.

5. Application Experts: Like resellers, MSPs understand applications, how they run in various environments and can offer functional support for the application in use and the business processes that those functions represent.  By partnering together, both the reseller and the MSP have access to more functional resources. These application experts truly understand their customer’s business workflow and how to enhance it.

6. Simplification Experts: MSPs are experts at taking the complex and simplifying it for their customers. They understand how to take complex tasks and make them repeatable processes.

7. Single Point of Contact: MSPs serve as the single point of contact to enable complex business workflows regardless of the services used. They own any problems that should arise and ensure continuity. Support is delivered by a global support team that is empowered to serve and support your business 24x7x365 with complete transparency at all levels without surprises or hidden costs.

8. Service-centric: MSPs are completely service-centric. They become an extension of their customer’s team and understand what it takes at all levels of the organization to make the relationship work.

9. Anticipate Problems: Proactive management of both the infrastructure as well as the application is a mainstay of MSP services. MSPs anticipate problems and try to resolve them before they impact their clients.

10. Simplified Billing: MSPs have been using the recurring business model for years and understand its benefits in the predictability for their customers.

When delivered effectively, cloud is simplistic, secure, and economical and delivers more value to the customer. However, as enterprises deploy more applications in the cloud, the complexity of deployment, integration and management increases. By partnering together cloud-savvy MSPs and Resellers can offer a suite of services to reduce risk during migration will give customers the lowest TCO possible.

Gina Murphy is executive vice president of Sales Enablement and Strategy for TriCore Solutions