The cosmic importance of MSPs
“My view of the market is that MSPs are, in essence, the future. I cannot foresee a future where MSPs don’t become more and more prevalent and relevant in the market” – Acronis CEO Ezequiel Steiner
As I’ve said before, I don’t know how anyone who isn’t an MSP can spend any longer not being one. When people keep saying how great they are, it’s hard not to be persuaded that, to adopt some lines from the theme song from Pirates of the Caribbean: “it’s an MSP’s life for me”. Not that I’m implying there’s any similarities between pirates and MSPs, far from it, although I think it’s fair to say that the channel has had its fair share of cowboys.
Anyway, in an interview with CRN last week, I think that Steiner did an effective job of setting out exactly why MSPs are so attractive for customers – and for vendors.
First, for the customer, he outlined that the complexity associated with IT is such that “there is no value” for a small or mid-market business, possibly enterprises too, in having their own internal experts. He argued that “economic reality” would make MSPs “the centre of all IT that will be provided to these customers”.
And in case anyone was left in any doubt, he described MSPs as “key to the future of the IT industry, the key to the success of not just their customers, but of the whole economy. I believe in the MSP model. I believe we can really help them and we’ll be doing our best to serve them”.
Steiner also noted, from Acronis’ perspective as a vendor, that MSPs were “the centre of our universe. They have always been the centre of our universe. Acronis has always, since day one, been a partner-centric company. We never do business direct”.
And you can see why vendors, generally, would be keen to recruit MSPs to promote and deploy their products and services to customers they would never be able to reach themselves.
So while the love-bombing by Steiner was pretty intense, it was probably understandable given that the company has 20,000 MSPs and is keen to recruit more.
I suppose the only worry, given their popularity, is that MSPs become complacent or big-headed. And you can see how that might become an issue and the service could decline if MSPs overstretch themselves or become too self-satisfied with their ‘exalted’ status. If there’s one thing they always need to remind themselves, it’s that they’re in the business of service provision. Failing to do so could be a very big mistake because if the service they provide declines, they could be heading out of that business.
No more Mr Nice Guy
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a column about mega-rich, self-entitled and whiny tech bros. One of the ‘stars’ of that article was Elon Musk. In the space of two weeks, he has since covered himself in even more ‘glory’ by allowing the platform most people still call Twitter to be used as a vehicle for inflaming racist and Islamophobic sentiment in England, inciting racist rioting and violent disorder in that country and Northern Ireland.
Additionally, he has claimed that civil war was “inevitable” in the UK, labelled Democrat nominee for US President Kamala Harris a “communist” and filed an antitrust lawsuit against advertisers for declining to advertise on the platform he rebranded as X.
“We tried to be nice for two years and got nothing but empty words,” Musk claimed. “Now it’s war.”
As a number of people have pointed out, Musk seems to have an interesting perspective on what being ‘nice’ means. They cited his comments at the DealBook conference in November last year when he told advertisers not to advertise and to “Go f*ck yourself”.
I’m not a billionaire tech genius, but the one thing I do know is that if someone asked me to be nice, I wouldn’t say what Musk said.
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