The biggest challenges facing the MSP market
CRN's Channel Conference on the MSP market unveiled what is troubling the burgeoning space
Channel firms gathered in London yesterday to hear MSP players and experts discuss the space and its challenges, including the issues of getting the right sales staff and industry collaboration.
Moderated by John Pepper, managing director of Managed 24/7, the conference's opening panel debate was on the evolution of MSPs, with the MSP space's key challenges outlined.
"The biggest challenge I have is finding the right people and I'm sure that is the same for most of us here," said Sonny Sehgal, director and co-founder of Transputec.
"You need the right people in order to grow the business and that seems to be a problem across the industry."
Craig Aston, commercial director of Celerity, said: "Coming from a reseller base, trying to teach reseller salespeople to sell services is extremely difficult.
"It also takes a long time to find good managed services sellers and getting them out of their current role makes the whole process very difficult."
For Lorrin White, managing director of Bamboo Technology Group, the collaboration aspect of the MSP market is an issue.
"While our clients and our partners would like us all to be in the same room to discuss overall strategies, the biggest challenge we have is actually bringing together everyone," she said. "This is difficult to overcome for the best of the client."
Rufus Grig, chief technology and strategy officer at Maintel, said: "We are seeing much more convergence, so customers wanting their providers to deal with a broader set of portfolios.
"That means there is a bunch of people we are competing with one day and then selling to the next day - knowing who your competitors are and who your friends are is actually quite hard sometimes."
Grig also said a possible development in the MSP market that could become a challenge is vendors looking to gain a slice of the services business and starting to compete with partners.
Elsewhere, the event covered the evolution of cloud and the new opportunities it presents to MSPs, resellers getting into the Internet of Things (IoT), improving sales and marketing, and the looming GDPR.
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