Size of MSPs
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@scottalanmiller said:
As SW is the largest global pool of the market, it's a decent reference point. Few other resources have thousands of MSPs in one place to compare them.
But no one past a certain size seems to care about being represented there. So your data is skewed about representation of MSPs to begin with?
That's true to some degree. Although some large shops are there or have been there. But you assume that there are an abundance of large shops and few small ones and only small ones take the time to have a social media presence or build an online reputation. What makes that true? You are assuming that there is a high percentage of large shops and that they just aren't visible with online presences. What makes that true?
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I guess it's because I worked for a shop which had 6 staff, plus contractors, X number of clients. We heard and dealt with many other shops of a similar size, none of whom had a presence on Spiceworks. In fact there are even smaller outfits with 1-2 people who have not heard of it.
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All the MSP's I know of have at least 20 employees.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
But surely the directory is broken even more, if a one man consultant with a website is an "IT Service Provider" on the community, then that skews the data even more.
How does it skew the data? Are you saying that you are correct by defining shops smaller than you want to be an MSP to not be an MSP and therefore the data is correct because the answer defines the data? I don't understand.
My whole point is that the average MSP is likely very small, based on what I've observed over the past decade, because of exactly this - tons of MSPs are one man shops. I guess you are saying that @Hubtech is not an MSP then? If so, what is that company?
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@scottalanmiller who knows.
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@scottalanmiller said:
NTG really isn't an MSP, we are an IT Outsourcer,
@Carnival-Boy said:
I have no idea what the difference in. From Wikipedia : "Managed services are the practice of outsourcing day-to-day management responsibilities and functions as a strategic method for improving operations and cutting expenses." That sounds like IT outsourcing to me.
@scottalanmiller said:
In practical terms, MSPs are the companies that do "managed services" which are predefined and typically billed on a per unit basis. It's that it is "managed services".
As an IT Outsourcer we act exactly like an internal IT department, not like a managed services vendor. MSPs are like many outsources like ADP for example. You adjust to them, not them to you. They have a specific service that they offer, and it is good, but you need to make your workflow work with them.
IT Outsourcers outsource IT only, not only IT in the form of a "managed service." It is a far more flexible service type.This this this.....
Bundy & Associates is an IT Outsourcer, not an MSP. We do not sell blocks of time or managed services.
We sell our time, billed hourly. Period. We do not resell hardware. We do not resell software.
We are a full IT Outsourcer. Among our employees, we can do anything IT related, from networks, to servers, to desktops, to helpdesk, to software develeopment, to business intelligence.
This is what an IT Outsourcer is. We are oyur IT department. We are just not your employee.
To be our client you have to let us be involved in your businiess plans in order to alow us to apply the appropriate IT solutions to fit your business needs and goals.If you cannot do that, then we will not want to be your IT company.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
I guess it's because I worked for a shop which had 6 staff, plus contractors, X number of clients. We heard and dealt with many other shops of a similar size, none of whom had a presence on Spiceworks. In fact there are even smaller outfits with 1-2 people who have not heard of it.
But how does that affect the data? I've worked with very large shops that use it too, but that doesn't imply that the percentages are mostly that it is large. It's a sampling, that's all, and what you are defining is the nature of sampling. There is literally no means of getting data that is not a sampling. So what do you suggest as a means of polling MSPs to find out size?
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@nadnerB said:
All the MSP's I know of have at least 20 employees.
None of the hundreds or thousands you know of here or in SW do. How do you know that they have that many? NTG does, sort of, if you include the part timers. Then we are way over twenty.
Because of the nature of MSP services (instead of IT Services) there is a tendency to have a lot of non-technical or L0 workers to take calls, do monitoring and run through scripts as a big piece of the value behind managed services is making them require as little IT knowledge as possible. So real VAR and MSP business models allow for larger staff than IT Outsourcing models.
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Look at where @thanksajdotcom is. He works for an MSP that is a real MSP/VAR. They focus on one product, the services are managed (predefined packages) and they have a lot of staff. Some of that staff is pretty technical. But a lot of it are not even really IT people but just call center staff who take calls and run through predefined scripts that they do not necessarily even understand.
When MSP models get larger, this is a very typical way that they staff up. That's not good or bad, just why they tend to get a lot of staff quickly when being successful.
But as someone who knows hundreds or possibly thousands of MSPs directly and has serviced many, the number that are that large are pretty small. But they certainly exist. NTG used to do all of the IT for an MSP that was over 65 people! Not one of them would I classify as an L1. They were all "bench support" or "call center" staff. Anything requiring IT knowledge, including extremely basic internal IT, had to be outsourced to NTG.
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@JaredBusch said:
Bundy & Associates is an IT Outsourcer, not an MSP. We do not sell blocks of time or managed services.
We sell our time, billed hourly. Period. We do not resell hardware. We do not resell software.
We are a full IT Outsourcer. Among our employees, we can do anything IT related, from networks, to servers, to desktops, to helpdesk, to software develeopment, to business intelligence.
This is what an IT Outsourcer is. We are oyur IT department. We are just not your employee.
OK. So if that is the definition of an IT Outsourcer, what is an MSP?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
OK. So if that is the definition of an IT Outsourcer, what is an MSP?
See @scottalanmiller's post preceding yours.
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@scottalanmiller said:
My whole point is that the average MSP is likely very small, based on what I've observed over the past decade, because of exactly this - tons of MSPs are one man shops. I guess you are saying that @Hubtech is not an MSP then? If so, what is that company?
Possibly the average. There are likely to be more small MSPs than large, but the large MSPs may still provide 95% of the industry. Most people I know use the massive players like Softcat and Pheonix - but there are only a handful of massive players.
Also, small companies may prefer to use small MSPs, so Spiceworks will see a larger number operating there. But medium and large companies will use medium and large MSPs.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
OK. So if that is the definition of an IT Outsourcer, what is an MSP?
I've definited it twice already. It's not outsourcing IT like an IT department. IT Outsourcer is really a broad term that MSP would fall under. But MSPs package their services and provide "managed" services, not straight IT.
Think of it as boxed services. You can't ask NTG or Bundy what we offer. There is no list. We offer IT. All of it. Sure, there are things we can't do, no one can actually do everything, but NTG defines what we do as the service list of an internal, enterprise IT department. Highly niche services are always outsourced to vendors or MSPs when things get unique enough, even if you are Apple, Walmart or Exxon Mobil.
MSPs have a service list. They do X and Y. They often are VARs too with what they sell tied to the support that they provide. They generally define how you will use their services so that what they do is predictable. You adjust to them, not them to you. This has a lot of advantages, but obviously, is less flexible. That's why the provides that @Breffni-Potter listed needed to "develop new managed services" to provide them. They have to come up with the package that they support, how they support it, how it is priced, etc. They have to make it so that non-tech or lower-tech staff can do most of the support because everything is tested, bundled and predictable and rarely needs real IT knowledge to manage.
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@scottalanmiller said:
That's why the provides that @Breffni-Potter listed needed to "develop new managed services" to provide them. They have to come up with the package that they support, how they support it, how it is priced, etc.
I can tell you that the list @Breffni-Potter gave are IT Outsourcers then, not MSPs, based on your definition.
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It's hard to define different service models without trying to sound like one is better than the other. I don't think that this is true. Straight IT Outsourcing is good for one customer, MSP is good for another. MSPs are easier to sell to customers because they are easier to explain. As an IT Outsourcer one of our biggest problems is that customers expect that everyone is an MSP plus a VAR and expect us to define everything, sell them everything and make money in places where we don't while providing a service and feature list that we don't have. Given them unlimited options makes them tend to flail and fail. So that is a tough challenge. But we almost never rip and replace to make things fit our "model" since we don't have one. Every customer is unique and treated the same as if we were their IT, not an outside firm with a package to sell. But this makes services more expensive because we can't scale in the same way and use low cost people to offload most of the labour.
NTG would love to develop an MSP model to run side by side but has never figured out exactly how to do that. That is something that we are looking into because it would help with offering a more complete set of services.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
That's why the provides that @Breffni-Potter listed needed to "develop new managed services" to provide them. They have to come up with the package that they support, how they support it, how it is priced, etc.
I can tell you that the list @Breffni-Potter gave are IT Outsourcers then, not MSPs, based on your definition.
Nope, you didn't read their pages. They were very specifically MSPs because they provide packages, not open services. SoftCat especially was very solid MSP.
You can normally tell if a vendor lists their "partners" all over their site. IT Outsourcers rarely do that because it doesn't really make any sense. Who cares who the partners are? You don't have partners for an internal IT department. That doesn't even make sense for an IT Outsourcer.
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@scottalanmiller said:
You don't have partners for an internal IT department. That doesn't even make sense for an IT Outsourcer.
Surely it's a form of marketing/accreditation for companies to recognise, ok if they are a Microsoft Gold Partner in Exchange, Server 2012, they probably have a clue about the Microsoft tech.
Most organisations already have a product that they need supporting, if I am looking for someone to look after my Cisco network, I'm going to look for the company with the Cisco partnerships and connections.
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Basically, to reiterate what @scottalanmiller said, if you have a list of specific services you support, products you offer, and products you work on, you're an MSP, because you define what you CAN do for the customer. An IT Outsourcer is basically someone who will walk into your environment and adjust the work and fill the needs of their staff to match what your company has. So with an MSP, if you had some system they didn't know or support, you'd have to find another vendor to handle that piece. With a true IT Oursourcer, the IT Outsourcer would find someone to join the staff or partner with another company to provide the support for that product, because they do everything.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You don't have partners for an internal IT department. That doesn't even make sense for an IT Outsourcer.
Surely it's a form of marketing/accreditation for companies to recognise, ok if they are a Microsoft Gold Partner in Exchange, Server 2012, they probably have a clue about the Microsoft tech.
Most organisations already have a product that they need supporting, if I am looking for someone to look after my Cisco network, I'm going to look for the company with the Cisco partnerships and connections.
Not necessarily. Many partners don't have any special skillsets with the companies they're partner with. Sometimes it just means they're a very high-volume reseller, which makes them a VAR.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Nope, you didn't read their pages.
I don't need to, Softcat and Pheonix are vendors of mine.
