Gaidar Magdanurov van Acronis ziet MSP's klem zitten: klanten willen minder betalen, alles wordt duurder en door AI groeit de concurrentie. Zijn advies: praat niet over uren en tickets maar over wat je de klant oplevert, bied onderscheidende diensten in plaats van lagere prijzen, en stel automatisering en AI niet uit.
So we're here at MSP Global at Barcelona. You people had an amazing presentation this morning on the stage, and I wanna dive a little bit into some of the details because what do you think are the biggest challenges that the MSP landscape is currently struggling with? Oh, so I would say a few. And this morning during breakfast I heard three different separate group of MSPs talking about the same thing. Customers trying to renegotiate the prices, so they don't wanna pay a lot, they actually wanna pay less as less as possible. That's one thing. The second thing, everything is becoming more expensive. The labor, the hardware So the margins are shrinking. And the third is the competitive pressure is just growing everywhere because everybody is deploying AI, everybody is becoming more productive, so larger MSPs, they can afford going after customers worldwide. Yeah. So almost every MSP is suffering because of that. Margin is shrinking, competition is becoming stronger. Yeah. And the only way for them to address that is actually to become more productive. So a small two, three person MSP can actually do the work of a larger MSP just using AI agents. And that's what we're trying to provide to people. And I think then, because you start with the pricing point, I think we see that happening in the market as well. I think a lot of MSPs struggle with that, but I also think, and I'm very interested in what your key takeaway is there, I also think that a lot of MSPs struggle to actually get a seat at the table early to kind of avoid the pricing discussion. I think yes, but what's really happening now is that most of the small businesses that are customers of MSPs, they are struggling themselves. So they are not making as much money or the margins are shrinking and the first thing they want to cut is IT. And what they do now is just say, oh, why do we need all those IT services? We can deploy AI applications, we can use AI for everything, and MSPs are probably using AI, so most likely we are not going to pay as much because they're not spending as many hours. And that's the terrible conversations to have because a lot of MSPs, even when they charge per device or per endpoint per user, they still have this conversation about how many hours does it take, what SLAs they provide, how many tickets they can process, and the customers say, oh, now you have AI, you don't have to spend that many hours on us, you have to reduce your price. So that's the wrong conversation. So MSP should start talking about solutions. And that's what we're talking about in our sessions because instead of talking about endpoints and users, you have to talk about the value delivered to the business. Do you think that's difficult for MSPs to transition in that conversation because I agree with you, definitely a lot of them are still talking about hours and not really outcome or business value. But do you think that the transition... How difficult is it to make that transition for MSPs? It's incredibly difficult. So in my experience, and I'm talking to MSPs every day for the last ten years, most of them are technical people. So they want to talk about tickets, SLAs, all of that stuff. But in reality customers don't care. What they care about is how much money you're saving for my business, how much money you're making for my business. I'll give you great example, I was just in a few calls with our partners that was selling disaster recovery. And one guy is failing at that because he says, oh, you know, we'll deploy this solution from Acronius. It's incredible. It's just a few minutes to recover. We have automated testing, automated failbacks. We have this round books blah blah blah blah. Customers don't care. The other guy who's actually doing good, what he does, he comes to the business owner and says, look, you have about ten hours of downtime on a monthly basis. One hour costs you a thousand bucks. You lose $10,000 every month. I will deploy this technology for you, you don't even have to care about what it is, I'll deploy that technology for you, it will cost you a thousand dollars a month, you'll save 9. That's it. And it's a direct sale. That's it. It sounds very easy. Right? Exactly. But it's super complicated because you go to a retail shop and you need to do the discovery. You ask, hey, what's... What are your problems? What what what are you struggling with? What are your employees complaining about. But in reality what you want to know is that how much money you're losing because you have downtime issues, you need to recover from ransomware attack. Or because you are very slow in processing orders, you're losing some opportunity or some money. Like, that's what you need to estimate and when you have the conversation about the actual money, the business owner will say, okay, I'll pay you 10,000 to make 20,000, makes sense, why not? Yeah. So what do you think is gonna be the the biggest trend or development we're gonna see moving into 2027? What I see right now is that the larger MSPs acquiring smaller MSPs at faster and faster pace because that's the easiest way to acquire customers. But the other trend I see is that MSPs becoming more productive. So the same team can serve more customers and there's a negative side to it because a lot of MSPs, the moment they can onboard more customers, start to compete on price. So they reach out to customers and offer them lower price than the competitor to switch them to their services, but eventually just leads to shrinking the margin. So it's it's it's a path to nowhere. What I recommend MSPs to do, when you increase your productivity and you can onboard more customers, keep offering differentiated services. So you can actually charge more and onboard more customers on new types of services like Jenny air protection. So do you think, because we also see in The Netherlands for example, the consolidation phase, right, where bigger companies acquire all these smaller MSPs, they build this big company about... With that, do you think that we're going to see more and more specialization as well in order for the smaller MSPs to survive? Yes. I I think so. You have to specialize because it's very hard to compete on scale, especially if you're a small MSP. And the reason most of the smaller MSPs fail is not even technology, it's mostly sales and marketing. You're a small MSP, you don't have resources to acquire new customers, you cannot catch up with the bigger guys. So the choice that some of them are making to stay in business is that they go after a specific vertical. Let's say, I know an MSP, two people MSP from New Jersey that service a lot of hedge funds in New York area, and they're doing great. But they just focus on a particular industry, and most of their sales and marketing is just word-of-mouth. So one customer tells another customer and they provide the service because they know the industry really well. I think for a lot of MSPs, the FOMO kicks in very fast. Right? If we're talking about niche or virtualization. That's true. That's true. And actually now with AI, every day you read the news, something new is happening. That happens to everybody, like customers, MSPs, they just don't know what to what to do. Like, shall we switch to something else? Shall we offer new services? It is hard. It is hard. But what I recommend all MSPs to do is to talk to your customers about the actual challenges that they have now and come up with solutions for those specific challenges. Because if you cannot really monetize on your existing customer base, going after somebody else will be much more expensive. Yeah. And more time consuming as well. So how do you support your partners on on this whole journey? We have a platform, so they have the technology, and we have Acronis Academy where we train people on how to use the product and how to sell the product. We even launched what we call MSP Academy, it's just vendor neutral, bunch of trainings about like sales marketing, how to run the MSP, because I believe that without it, it's really hard to stay competitive right now. So what would be your biggest tip or key takeaway for the MSP startup watching us? Do not delay automation, do not delay AI implementation. It always seems like you still have time that in reality you don't.
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