According to CRN, the managed services market reached $145.3 billion in 2016 and “will grow at a rate of 10.8% to $245.5 billion by 2021.”
As cloud computing technology continues to gain traction in the market, more and more organizations are turning towards Managed Service Providers (MSPS) to leverage expertise, improve security, cut costs and improve uptime. With increased demand comes a slew of competition, making strong customer relationships even more critical for today’s MSPs. Continue reading our guide for managed service providers to start building customer relationships today.
As the IT industry continues to shift away from traditional professional services towards cloud and Saas applications, MSPs must find a way to adapt their strategies. What was once a matter of selling physical products has now grown into something much bigger – Infrastructure as a Service, or, “a standardized, highly automated offering, where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities are owned and hosted by a service provider and offered to customers on-demand.”
How can managed service providers adapt to this shifting technology marketplace?
As a managed service provider, it’s your job to help your customers see the future and provide a way to help them reach those goals through technology-based solutions. At the same time, you must stay committed to internal innovation. For MSPs, no two accounts are alike, so you must tailor your services based on the evolving needs of your customers. Adding recurring and usage based offerings to your portfolio will help your customers transform their businesses and, in turn, keep you competitive. In order to succeed in this space, MSPs must find a sophisticated billing solution that is capable of usage based billing.
When it comes right down to it, MSPs must keep their focus on value-added services and an up-to-date solutions stack.
CompTIA, the world’s leading tech association, is spearheading this usage based service movement for MSPs. Annette Taber, CompTIA’s vice president of industry outreach, had this to say about their recent Business Apps Council launch, “Companies represented on the council come from the ‘as a service’ world, with applications and solutions delivered via the cloud and sold to customers as subscriptions. But while their route to market may differ from traditional channel companies, we believe there are many opportunities for the two to coexist and cooperate. Our goal is to identify opportunities for collaboration and create the tools to make it possible.”
It’s an exciting time for MSPs. If you want to learn more about how our telecom billing platform can help you scale your managed services businesses and enrich your customer managed relationships, contact Rev.io at any time.