I don’t know if Master MSP has been fully defined.  I am sure your goal, as is part of mine, is to be a Trusted Advisor to your partners.  So in that sense, you and I are walking a parallel path.  Frankly, I don’t like labels, so whether the industry decides you and I are Master MSPs or Managed Services Distributors is really a moot point because you and I, and some of the others entering this game, are leading the way regardless of what the others who are just now doing studies want to define us as.  It’s hard to define those companies who are ahead of the curve.

Ingram, Synnex, & Tech Data are definitely trying to do more and more on the service side.  Their biggest Achilles heel is that they have never been a services organization and therefore have a very difficult time translating the product sales & finance model into a services sales & finance model. This is why it’s taking them so long to get it all right.  Notice how often they change their pricing, change their offerings, etc.  That's exactly why the "Value Added" makes such sense, and that’s why someone like you or I can make a big difference in the MSP Channel as a Managed Services Distributor.  Look at what you do now.  You are bridging the gap between resellers who don’t know how to or who want to implement quickly Level Platforms and Autotask.  You source Level and Autotask and resell with value wrapped around it.  I would assume you’re going to make sure those fundamental tools are fully integrated, fully functional, and will wrap your past services expertise around that offering to make a lot of good sense for your partners to buy from you rather than go direct to Autotask or Level Platforms.

That is VERY different from what Ingram does (I am picking Ingram because they resell Autotask and Level Platforms too, so in a sense look like a competitor to you and I).  All that Ingram does is resell those products.  In fact, they work with Level and Autotask sales people in a referral relationship – no direct expertise at all.  The only way they can deliver industry best practices or consultation is to hire it in house or outsource it to someone like MSP University.  You and I already have that expertise in house – we’ve lived and breathed building a profitable MSP practice and there is value in that knowledge that simply cannot be recreated by the big guys (Ingram, Synnex, Teach Data, Dell, etc.).

Maybe you and I are something different that has yet to be defined by those who are analyzing what’s happening right now?

Amy Luby
www.mspsn.com
aluby at mspsn dot com