Building healthy, professional alliances does not require the loss of individual identity or value – we’re not proposing an “all or nothing” philosophy here, and none of us have all the answers.

This is the reason we appreciate and promote partnering, rather than taking a closed system approach to building our memberships, and look forward to continuing in this effort.

Erick Simpson
MSP University
http://www.mspu.us

Cooperation leads to open standards (Ethernet, TCP/IP, etc.) and better education. Competition (Linux vs. Windows vs. Mac OS X, for example) leads to customer choice, new innovations and lower costs.

We need to blend both in the managed services market. We need to cooperate to put in the infrastructure — the highways, if you will — so that MSPs and organizations can compete against each other on those highways.

Don’t get me wrong I built my business on partnering and as such have 150 channel partners that I work with every day. What I am saying is that we need to be careful not to create a single vendor type solution when it comes to training and education.

Take this as an example, if Kaseya, Level Platforms, N-Able and Silverback had all gotten together 5 years back and decided to partner rather than compete where would their technology be today. Only guessing here but I would suspect that it would be much less powerful and robust then it is today. Not only that, MSPs would have much fewer options to choose from when selecting a platform.

Interesting perspective. A friend of mine over at Trend just sent me the latest IDC Channel Report which states, “Those that do survive will do so by building strong alliances with other partners as well as having superior customer service capabilities. For these partners, the definition of a customer will have to extend well beyond just the end user because other partners, ISVs, and service providers will also be their customers.”

I do believe that we all need to be open to partnering in order to survive, but also because it’s good for the Channel.

Amy Luby
http://www.mspsn.com
aluby at mspsn dot com

I also work with the Education Committee for the MSP Alliance, our charter is to provide a solid educational program for MSPs attending the MSP Alliance events.

Also I do want to say that although I agree that MSPs should be partnering together, I think that perhaps it may be better for the MSP community if those of us providing training and education don’t partner up too much. If we continue to develop our own unique programs not only will there be more options for the MSP community but the content will continue to improve.

Finally Mike, I created an account on your MSP Coach site and viewed some of the content, it looks very good. Keep up the good work and thanks for your dedication.

Lane Smith
http://www.doitsmarter.com
http://www.domspsmarter.com

Mike

MSPSN’s (MSP Services Network) focus is to bring MSPs together as Community to help each other leverage our individual strengths to grow our businesses. We provide education and training, like we did with our MSP Revolution event last weekend where we brought a much higher level of learning and true business training to our partners than any other event to date focused on MSPs. We also provide support services to the MSPSN Community through our Virtual Service Desk. We’ve taken our own business model and through our Virtual Service Desk provide a road map to the MSP who is looking for direction and guidance in growing their business. That road map consists of education, tools, and service delivery. We put it all together to give them a foundation from which to grow, and tools and support to manage that growth.

As Erick states, we too are very focused on partnering for growth and success and would be very open to dialogue in that regard. Erick (MSPU) and I (MSPSN) have partnerd to deliver more & better content to both of our groups, and MSPSN brings the top tier vendors & manufacturer solutions to their base through partnering because it’s good for them, good for us, and good for the Channel.

I commend you for stepping out and providing content and support to the MPSs. The more good information we have in the Channel about growing profitable Managed Services practices the better the whole Channel ecosystem will be.

Amy Luby
http://www.mspsn.com
aluby at mspsn dot com