Keep your rivals in mind but focus all of your forward-looking efforts on your customers.

Good job moderating the panel. I enjoyed participating. It’s too bad you had to dash out to go to Australia though (tough being you, eh?)!

A quick point about your post: MSPs should be concerned about the moves made by Microsoft and others ONLY if they don’t do something about it first.

It is a FACT that centralized computing models will be the focal point of the new IT paradigm. Nothing will stop this momentum.

But whether MS and others actually do steal your customers is not the real risk (I’m quite confident that MSPs will fight to the death if necessary!). The real risk is that MS and others will in fact make the attempt. This process is where the risk is for the MSP. It is a risk of margin and coverage erosion. Will you keep your customer? Perhaps. But at what price? What price will you have to pay in margin because the numbskulls at Microsoft and Dell and Amazon have dropped their proverbial pants and told your customer, for better or for worse, they can do this for next to nothing?

We believe the right response is to deliver the technology solution your customer will soon demand, and that MS and others will offer, preemptively. Run your customers key business systems now. Move those applications (whatever they are) to a centralized computing model TODAY (just make sure you don’t let someone run them that will try to eat your lunch tomorrow!). And when MS comes knocking your customers can tell them “sorry, my trusted advisor already has us sorted out, but thanks for calling!” (Ok, over simplified for sure, but hopefully you get my point!)

As my mother always told me, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.