Has the modern workplace spawned a new breed of MSP?

Dropbox channel lead says its most successful partners are now selling five to eight cloud-based applications in a single wrap

The role that resellers and MSPs need to play is fundamentally shifting thanks to the emergence of a new generation of staff in the workplace.

That's according to Tim Britt, head of UK channels at Dropbox Business, who will be laying out the characteristics that successful channel partners of the future will need to possess in a live CRN webinar next Tuesday.

With the average worker now said to be interacting with around nine content-producing applications each day, channel partners who continue to sell only point products from the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, Google and AWS will begin to lose relevance, Britt (pictured) told CRN ahead of the event.

"I think a couple of years ago, as a reseller, you almost had a recipe book - ‘these are the five or six things that are going to make your business improve and that's all we sell'," he said.

"Compared with now, where the role of an MSP or VAR needs to be able to manage multiple, complex environments."

The new breed of channel partner will need to build a collaboration layer that can absorb the variety of premium ware applications that employees now use, Britt advised.

Most partners have yet to make that transition successfully, however, Britt claimed.

"You have a base of partners that who come from a desktop, network, switching, on-premises file server world and are transitioning to the cloud. They're only selling a single cloud SKU, and are massively at risk of one-click churn. We have a partner base there," he explained.

"But we also have a base where a high percentage of the products they sell are cloud applications, from CRM through to cyber-security and unified communications as a service. They will look to sell five to eight cloud-based applications that they will wrap into a complete service. It's very hard to split that down and so it avoids that one-click churn.

"That's where we've seen that growth in our partner community. They're coming in and saying ‘you can go and buy you hardware from Amazon or eBay, but we will deliver your cloud application services wrapped up in a bespoke offering'."

Dropbox kicked off a UK channel push in 2016 and has now amassed over 10,500 partners worldwide.

Join us live at 11am on Tuesday, 4 June to hear more about how Dropbox sees the partner landscape evolving.