MSPs: Should the Cloud be Your Flagship Offer?

Written by Michael Brown 1
February 17, 2014

MSPs offer a lot of services (and hence, alot of value) to their clients regardless of what technology is being leveraged. But with the explosion of cloud spending, does this approach still make sense?

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have been around much longer than cloud technology. Since their value has not – generally speaking, anyway – been tied to any one particular technology, they have been able to continue adapting to the evolving needs of their clients. They are, in a manner of speaking, technology agnostic. They will help businesses solve their problem no matter what tools are put in place.

But is this the right approach? Should MSPs more closely align themselves to certain technologies, especially the cloud?

Right now, it’s hard to come up with an argument against this approach. Why? Because the cloud boom seems to be growing, and both current and projected numbers are there to back it up. Take a look at this:

Corporate spending on cloud computing is headed sky high, according to a report Friday from IHS Technology.

Cloud-related tech spending by businesses is forecast to triple from 2011 to 2017, the research firm said. By 2017, enterprise spending on cloud computing will amount to a projected $235.1 billion, triple the $78.2 billion spent in 2011, IHS said.

This year, global business spending for infrastructure and services related to the cloud will reach an estimated $174.2 billion, up 20 percent from the amount spent in 2013. Cloud services, applications, security and data analytics will account for an ever-growing portion of total information technology spending by enterprises, valued today at about $2 trillion.

And this:

Jagdish Rebello, IHS principal analyst for the cloud and big data, said it’s a sign of the market’s vigor as large and small businesses move more applications to the cloud and use Big Data to improve products and services for customers.

“With the cloud touching nearly every consumer and enterprise around the globe, spending for cloud-related storage, servers, applications and content will be dedicated toward building a framework that is rapidly scalable, highly dynamic, available on-demand and requiring minimal management,” he said.

Such developments will drive multi-billion-dollar investments in cloud-based architectures, Rebello said.

As you can see, if an MSP were to deal exclusively with cloud technology, they would be positioning themselves within the fastest-growing segment of technology today. I suspect that many MSPs will eventually find themselves in this position by default; they will spend the majority of their time and effort on cloud-related technology whether they planned on it or not. But for the MSPs who proactively position themselves as the “Cloud MSPs”, it’s a different story.

Business have a lot of pain points associated with technology: implementation, management, training, etc. Unfortunately, many of these pains are associated with out-of-date technologies – technologies that will soon be replaced or augmented by the cloud.

So is it time to position yourself and your business as the cloud MSP? We’ll leave that for you to decide, but the way it’s looking now (and in the near future) the answer appears to be yes. What do you think? Be sure to let us know in the comments section.