By Insight Guest Blog 1

“Smart businesses build strong partnerships,” Microsoft’s Keith Barnett wrote in the welcome letter for registration to the 2015 Cloud and Hosting Summit. This year’s conference was no different than past events, connecting leaders across the industry to share ideas on how to build their businesses and lead innovation. Many of the conference presenters–including market leaders from Veeam, Citrix and Cisco–talked about the challenges today’s MSPs face. While Barnett gave the short written answer, here are three ways you can leverage your partnerships to build a lasting service provider business.

1. Differentiate Your Core

Whether you are just getting started or want to transform your business, first determine what the core of your company is and how it separates you from the competition. New businesses should focus on their main activity, as well as the financial viability of it.

Established businesses should be in the habit of re-evaluating the core for long-term profitability and the looming threat of disruptive competitors– something I call the “Google Factor.”

Established service providers should be asking themselves, “What am I prepared to do if someone else starts offering a free version of my service?” I remember paying an annual fee for my first email account, a service model that is just one casualty of Google’s new economy. What will be the next XaaS to be offered in a drastically disruptive way, and how can you protect yourself?

2. Diversify Your Core

One way to protect yourself is by adding complimentary value to your core offering. For managed service providers, this broadens and diversifies both the base of your potential customers and your base of revenue within existing clients, making your business much stickier.

For example, desktop-as-a-service providers should look to transition from simplified hosted desktop to true hosted workspaces, including hosted telephony, virtualized apps, CRM and managed file shares. ISVs will want to continue their journey to cloud with infrastructure-as-a-service, leveraging the right combination of cloud and on-premise solutions for an elastic platform and delivery on-demand.

3. Scale Your Core

In the cloud, the platform is everything. Where MSPs will want to focus on how they deliver, ISVs may emphasize app architecture and management. In either case, the answer is to focus on what truly brings value to your business, and leverage best-in-class partnerships to handle the rest. By devoting your time and attention to what brings your clients the most value, you give yourself a better chance for success.

If vendor management, multisite deployment or network architecture aren’t your core competencies, and aren’t part of what differentiates you, consider bringing in a trusted partner. The right partnerships will augment your skills and reduce the time it takes for you to bring value to your clients.

Brian Schoepfle presented on the service provider and ISV market the first day of the 2015 Cloud and Hosting Summit. He is the West region manager for the managed service provider team at Insight, supporting clients in the hosted application/workload/platform space in their efforts to add new products to their portfolios and reduce time-to-deploy. Follow him on Twitter @the_CXO, as well as Insight’s managed service provider team @Insight_MSP. Insight has sold more than 7 million business and public sector client cloud seats across the globe. With approximately 5,200 teammates worldwide, Insight is ranked No. 483 on the 2014 Fortune 500 and generated sales of $5.1 billion for the year ended Dec. 31, 2013. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.