However, as we’ve seen with our own partners, the shift to adding managed services to their business model isn’t as challenging as some may think—and certainly offers greater success than ignoring the shift altogether.

Why ride the wave of change?

We’ll come back to MSPs, but take a moment to think about how Uber and Lyft transformed the user experience of ordering a taxi with mobile technology. By providing transparency and a sense of control to their riders, they’ve alleviated the hair-pulling anxiety of not knowing your driver’s status—which can throw a wrench in an otherwise pleasant night of drinking (or a business travel outing, sure). The point is: although Uber and Lyft cashed in early by quickly changing their business process to embrace mobile technology, it hasn’t exactly “doomed” the taxi industry so much as it’s proven that it pays to ride the wave of change early on.

Now consider: cloud technology has granted similar conveniences through easy anywhere, anytime access of data, with greater security and a better price tag than traditional on-prem maintenance. As our own Rocco Seyboth, VP of product and marketing, noted in the article, “born-in-the-cloud” MSPs are already capitalizing on this cloud revolution, while the established SMB-focused MSPs face challenges in pulling up the anchor from their traditional business model and steering toward new waters. Worse off are the providers with rolled-up pants, waiting for the flood—until they’re “forced” to migrate their customers to the cloud.

Why would any MSP wait?

While the benefits of the cloud are obvious, the right solutions to help MSPs build their end-to-end cloud business are less so; the challenges extend beyond just “sluggishness in presenting cloud alternatives” to customers, as the article suggests. A modern managed services model still has to start with a sale—and most MSPs are IT providers at heart whose strength is not in sales and marketing.

In tomorrow’s follow-up blog, we’ll talk about how MSPs can ready their sales crew to claim more business in the cloud!