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MSP 501 Winners Share Market Outlook, Perspectives

Point of view, perspective

The world has changed dramatically and fast over the past year, disrupting the entire MSP community. With the onset of the pandemic, leaders of the Channel Futures MSP 501 had to rewrite their go-to-market strategies, accelerate cloud adoption and respond to customer needs in innovative ways. 

Alltek Services' Tom BowlesThe result was a fundamental change in business models and practices. MSPs and channel vendors alike now want to get a feel for what’s coming next. 

In this session at Channel Partners Virtual, Tom Bowles, president of Alltek Services; his colleague, Taher Hamid, vice president of business development; and Joe McCartney, president and CEO of Pioneer-360, discussed the critical issues they are facing, plans for accelerating growth and what the future holds for their customers and partners.

A lot of movement in any direction is obviously contingent on the market. All panelists were able to meet their growth goals in 2020, which is no small feat considering the herculean task of getting their customers set up for secure remote work after COVID-19 hit. 

“We increased our customers’ and employees’ remote desktop servers, we utilized our RMM tools and remote control software, and we did migrations to the cloud,” said Bowles. “From March of 2020 through June, that was about 90% of what we did.”

Alltek Services' Taher HamidHamid offered further insight as to how the company provided, and still provides, value for their customers.

“One of the things we really focused on initially was adding to our stack,” said Hamid. “We added security aspects and extra expertise, and then pitched that extra value to clients. Because of that, we were able to improve our current customer revenue quite a bit. It’s easy to get so focused on getting new customers, that you forget the opportunity within your current client base. We’ve seen a lot of opportunity here because our customers are actually eager to be more secure, to learn more about what their IT actually is.”

Pioneer-360's Joe McCartneyMcCartney added that an easy trap to fall into is adding too much to one’s stack. 

“People add a lot of off-value things to their stacks,” said McCartney. “I see a lot of MSPs making that mistake. You need to build your stack, but it needs to be super dialed into what a client needs. Then you build that and make it security-centric. This is absolutely critical in today’s MSP’s market.”

Tags:
Channel Partners Virtual, MSP 501