Paul Zimmerman, Chief Technical Officer and Vice President, Fidelis

Written by Allison Francis
January 28, 2022

[Re: the fact that the majority of end customers (55%) are spending more and more each year with their MSPs]:

“Smart business leaders are embracing technology to make their businesses more flexible and efficient. Leaders of small and medium-size businesses especially are realizing that having a strategic relationship with their MSP is beneficial. The MSP can bring in outside perspectives about what tools or technologies might be appropriate for them to implement, keep them up-to-date on the latest trends, and help to reduce risk to their organizations of security threats.

“In our business, we find that those clients who embrace regular strategic business reviews with our team are growing faster and innovating more than their peers who do not invest their time and attention to their relationship with their technology partners.

[Re: the fact that MSP leaders estimate engineers devote 39% of time into manual tasks and 88% say these tasks prevent engineers from spending time on innovation or advancing strategic goals]:

“Many tools that MSPs use offer integration with other platforms, but they can be hard to set up and maintain. However, having a deeply integrated stack of tools and technologies (sometimes requiring custom-written tools) allows an MSP to leverage technology to make their service delivery more consistent, reduce mistakes, and automate processes that previously had to be done manually.

“For example, we have written a tool that audits client contracts and automatically will create tickets in our PSA platform for scheduled maintenance tasks that we have committed to as part of our service bundles. This prevents human errors and ensures that we are delivering services that we committed to. We created another tool that will automatically update customer profiles based on the services that we are billing for (for example, Office 365, BCDR, EDR, SOC, NOC, help desk, etc.) so that our account managers don’t have to dig for information about a client and can see the client’s tech stack represented in a single location that is always kept up to date. These used to be manual processes or checklist items on projects that were prone to human error.

“By implementing automation in our own operations, we’ve become more efficient, less prone to error, and able to serve more clients without having to add additional personnel.”

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Allison Francis

Allison Francis is a writer, public relations and marketing communications professional with experience working with clients in industries such as business technology, telecommunications, health care, education, the trade show and meetings industry, travel/tourism, hospitality, consumer packaged goods and food/beverage. She specializes in working with B2B technology companies involved in hyperconverged infrastructure, managed IT services, business process outsourcing, cloud management and customer experience technologies. Allison holds a bachelor's degree in public relations and marketing from Drake University. An Iowa native, she resides in Denver, Colorado.