Nerdio’s Joseph Landes

Much of this “unprecedent growth” in the channel will occur around cloud technology. This is the opinion of Joseph Landes, CRO of Nerdio, a firm that provides Azure Virtual Desktop provisioning and management services delivered by MSPs. Landes spends much of his time with MSPs who deliver Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 managed services, as well as cloud VDI.

“It’s very interesting to open up LinkedIn every day and see the new acquisition, or the new merger or whatever. We’ve certainly had partners that we’ve worked with that have been bought by other companies or have bought other companies,” he said.

Landes underscored that Nerdio itself spun out of an MSP two years ago. Whether a company is acquired may depend on whether its technology is cloud-based.

“So it’s not new to us,” Landes said. “The part of the value chain that I really focus on in the MSP space is getting people to move to the cloud, because I think that if you’re an MSP and you’re just going to Dell and HPE and buying a server, you’re really going to get left behind, because that’s just the old technology and people don’t want to do that anymore. I think whether you’re or an MSP that just got bought or you’re buying someone else, that’s the direction you need to head in or you’re going to be disadvantaged.”

Landes didn’t hold back on his assessment.

“Every time that I’ve talked to an MSP who’s been acquired, it feels more like an exit than anything else, not a massive transformational step forward,” he said.