Over 100 MSPs converged on IT Europa's Managed Services Summit North event staged in Manchester on 30th October.
Key takeaways include a greater awareness of the pressures MSPs are under from ever demanding customers seeking good advice, with the squeeze felt most acutely in the south of England compared to northern regions. Meanwhile, resourcing skills continues to be an industry bugbear along with keeping pace with the times.
In his keynote IT Lab Group CEO Peter Sweetbaum highlighted that changes from Microsoft and others were causing MSPs to think hard about resourcing just to keep up, a challenge felt most by smaller ICT providers.
The fast moving ICT industry may also prove precarious for those with a dependency of more than 20% on one customer, regarded by potential acquirers as a risk, noted Sweetbaum. IT Lab’s biggest customer is about 3% of profits, he said.
John Garratt, Editor of IT Europa, observed that MSP marketing will be a key issue in defining and building business pipelines in the coming period, and he urged MSPs to make the most of the resources made available to them by vendors.