ConnectWise Partner Summit – What I’d like to know..

ConnectWise Partner Summit starts in a few days and it’s one of the biggest MSP-centric events of the year that brings together all walks of IT life.

Last year the vibe was very positive, attendees were excited and everyone was “trying to move my clients to managed services” but since then we’ve had a catastrophic collapse of the banking industry, something damn near a stock market crash, record streak of unemployment growth and a slowdown of all measurable economic growth indicators.

Looking over the numbers that we track, pure play MSP’s have been hit the hardest. They led the pack in the percentage of closed shops and they were overwhelmingly the ones that lost the largest number of seats.

In the same time span, OWN has had an all time record growth in accounts, revenues and profits (unfortunately we’ve also had to do a lot of collections and longer DSO as economy spares no one). Today is our biggest $ day, ever. Our partners at MSP University, ConnectWise, Autotask, CharTec have also posted record numbers and the MSP solution provider presence at conferences and events is bigger than it’s ever been.

What Vlad would like to know is….

It’s obvious that the only people making significant money in the MSP industry are the software and outsourcing companies providing managed service providers with services that they use to manage end customers. MSPs aren’t doing so hot. Some are even losing out to their suppliers that compete for MSP business, such as Dell.

With the space getting crowded and the deliverable/value very difficult to differentiate and distinguish between MSPs.. which other lines of business are MSPs going into to actually generate profit growth?

So where is the money at? Let me know, we’ll have a booth at both HTG and ConnectWise events next week, would love to hear some really good MSP stories and ideas for a change.