Contributed article by Mark Clayman, Chief Operating Officer for TriCore Solutions

MSPs Rise to Prominent Role in Cloud Ecosystem

Many initially believed that cloud computing would put MSPs out of business. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, MSPs, and in particular managed application service providers, are poised to become critical players in the cloud ecosystem.

Now that enterprises are beginning to deploy a broad range of cloud services from infrastructure to applications to meet a wide variety of user needs, it is becoming extremely apparent that there is a lot of extra work associated with using cloud services for enabling and enhancing enterprise applications that were not previously understood.  As more and more services are deployed, cloud integration, deployment, and management has become very complex. Many of the benefits of cloud services are often lost as organizations scale due to the complexity. 

Gartner has coined the term "Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB)" and defines it as a company or other entity that adds value to one or more cloud services on behalf of one or more consumers of that service via three primary roles including aggregation, integration and customization. I would venture to say that managed application service providers are the best positioned organizations to become a cloud brokers, leveraging their deep experience in managing applications, complex integrations and business workflows.

Managed application service providers have been aggregating, integrating, customizing, deploying and managing infrastructure and application services for years without the benefits of a cloud-based infrastructure. Now that cloud computing technology has evolved, the infrastructure portion of the solution has become a utility. The hard part and where the managed application service provider's true expertise comes into play is with the aggregation, integration, deployment and management of multiple cloud-base applications to deliver a fully managed enterprise application solution.

Here is why managed application service providers will be critical players in the cloud ecosystem in 2014.

• MSPs own the customer relationship. They serve as the single point of contact to enable complex business workflows.
• MSPs are completely service-centric. They literally become an extension of their customer's team and understand what it takes at all levels of the organization to make the relationship work.
• MSPs have been using the recurring business model for years and understand its benefits as well as its drawbacks.
• MSPs are experts at taking the complex and simplifying it for their customers. They understand how to take complex tasks and make them repeatable processes.
• MSPs have extensive relationships with vendors that are key to extending the value of applications their customers are utilizing. They are experts at vendor management as well as packaging services from multiple vendors that collectively create new functionality from a common platform.
• MSPs understand that one size does not fit all. Almost all cloud deployments require a level of service integration and customization. Unlike pure IaaS players, MSPs are skilled at mass customization.
• MSPs understand applications and offer functional support beyond cloud and IT services.
• MSPs are infrastructure agnostic. They will host customer applications in their own cloud or broker/negotiate cloud services from their customers' IaaS vendor of choice.

##

About the Author

Prior to joining TriCore, Mark was the SVP of Sales and Marketing at NaviSite where he was responsible for driving revenue by providing scalable, customer-centric application and managed services solutions. Mark joined NaviSite through the acquisition of Surebridge, Inc., a provider of application management services where he served as Vice President and CIO, responsible for developing and managing the Service Delivery organization.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Penn State University.