Let me dumb it down for you

I’m on family leave till 2011 and the only thing I forgot to do in my checkout checklist was to redirect my cell phone back to the office. So yesterday as I was cleaning up I got a phone call from a “friend of a friend of a partner who was told he needed to talk to Vlad about this cloud thing”.

Now, for the record, I love this because someone already preped the guy about the kind of conversation he was going to have.

Friend: So X tells me you’re a really straight forward guy so let me level with you: we’ve got a big MSP and I’m getting hit up from all sides to start doing cloud stuff but I just don’t want to change our business model.

Vlad: Ok. How is it going to change?

Friend: <looooooooong story, story of selling copiers and modems>

Vlad: Do you mind if I curse? (now, if you do, the next paragraph is not for you)

Friend: <Laughs>. Go for it.

Vlad: You’re an MSP, right? So for all intents and purposes, you are the cloud. You’re the CIO in the cloud. You’re an IT guy in the cloud. You’re the advice in the cloud. Your business doesn’t change one bit, for the most part the technology you support doesn’t either – but your marketing does. So same shit, different clipart. Get it?

He assured me that I’ve just earned a client for life.

Truth is, MSPs are no different than the cloud. The same fear bullshit you sell about the cloud as a managed service provider can be sold about you. Here are a few examples:

My clients don’t trust their data to be stored in the cloud! Oh yeah? But they gave you administrative credentials over their entire network, domain and third party vendors for phone, DNS, Internet, etc?

My clients don’t want an unreliable or unaccountable third party involved. If that were true, you’d be unemployed. You mean to tell me this strict accountability and internal control freak didn’t want an employee he could boss around and fire at a whim – he signed a binding (at times multi-year) contract with the party that controls most of the licensing and at times even hardware?

What about unreliable connectivity? It’s similar to the unreliable technician, unreliable MSP, unreliable server and everything else – you build in redundancy and survive.

The bottom line is, MSPs are IT departments in the cloud. Call it a Public CIO if it makes you feel more important. Reality is, most organizations are somewhere between a Private IT Department and Public CTO/CIO, depending on where you draw the distinction. Most small organizations don’t have a need for a full time tech person, so they hire an MSP that gives them a fraction of the time and full power of IT expertise. Some have a private IT department that manages all the in-house stuff but they rely on an Public CTO/CIO to give them direction and introduce new technologies, facilitate big projects, etc.

There.

It’s as simple as that.

Now let me blow your mind: What’s the biggest trend in the cloud? Cost cutting. With billions of alternatives, cost leaders win. Now. If the MSPs are the same as the cloud, what does this do to the overall profitability and growth opportunity for the MSPs?

Disagree (come on, you know you want to!)??? Add a comment!