Blockchain or Bust

You don’t have to deploy it just yet but should at least be thinking about it if you care about relevance. Plus: Gradient MSP’s community-first pricing tool and The 20’s big buy.

I dedicated the first part of a recent post to accelerating demand for Internet of Things solutions. Judging by the traffic numbers, this was not a topic many of my readers were itching to read about.

I have a hunch I’m in for a similar response to the topic I’m leading with this week, and if I’m correct—and my theory about why I’m correct is correct as well—it points to an issue worth flagging for MSPs, people investing in MSPs, and vendors selling to MSPs.

The topic in question is blockchain, and my inspiration for writing about it was a conversation on the sidelines of CompTIA’s 2024 ChannelCon conference this week with Curtis O’Neal (pictured), founder of Cybernetics Global, a solution provider based in the area. I last spoke with O’Neal close to a year ago in conjunction with the first (and until now only) post I’ve done on blockchain and wanted to catch up on the subject with him, because I’ve not met anyone who thinks longer, harder, or smarter about putting blockchains to real-life work.

“My team swears that I want to put blockchain on everything,” O’Neal jokes. “I just tell them I believe in it.”

A year after our last conversation, that belief is still something he talks about with clients more than implements for them, but he’s talking in much more specific terms about much more specific use cases with a much wider range of potential customers.

Wide enough, in fact, that in principle I could be one of them. Publishers, O’Neal notes, are increasingly suing LLM builders for hoovering copywrited material into training databases without permission. Wouldn’t it be helpful if Channelholic, should it ever opt to sue, could not just allege that its content was stolen but prove it?

In theory, all I’d have to do is use an automated process to register a unique ID in a blockchain like ContentBox for every article I write, plus every sentence within those articles. The result would be immutable proof of authorship that would follow my many sentences across the internet and into AI training models.

Or how about something similar that protects the AI vendors? I’ve written recently about the dangers of “data poisoning” (dangers so potent, by the way, that “poisoning as little as 0.001% of AI datasets can be sufficient to introduce targeted mistakes in a model’s behavior,” per research from managed intelligence vendor Nisos published yesterday). Why not use a blockchain-based catalog of known-safe content providers to stop LLMs from ingesting bad content?

“If they don’t recognize certain blockchain signatures, then that’s not a credible source to get the information,” O’Neal says.

Application developers, meanwhile, can put a signed, time-stamped hash of clean code on-chain to protect consumers from compromised software. “If that code changed a little bit, everybody would get a warning,” O’Neal says.

The point is that with a little creative thinking and a little research, most coders, solution providers, and MSPs can turn blockchains into a source of customer value and incremental revenue.

Which brings us to my theory about why my IoT post didn’t catch on, and this one might not either. Creative thinking and education take time, and many coders, solution providers, and MSPs are too worried about today’s headaches to think much about tomorrow’s technologies.

Totally understandable, but a problem nonetheless, for two reasons. First, getting in late on important innovations is a risk most MSPs in particular can’t afford at a time when “the biggest competition for small MSPs is other MSPs who are small but are moving faster,” to quote Canalys analyst Robin Ody, and huge MSPs with extremely deep pockets are looming on the horizon.

And second, blockchain isn’t tomorrow’s technology. “It’s here,” O’Neal says. “Microsoft has tons of things running on blockchain right now, but you don’t know it. It’s just the backend. Google has tons of things running on blockchain. They don’t talk about it.”

Or not loudly, anyway, but there’s actually a fully-managed service that lets total newbies hand all the heavy lifting of building and operating a blockchain over to Google. “You just click a button and then it just pretty much is almost like an underlay to your app,” O’Neal says.

Making IT providers aware of options like that in clear, compelling terms is the mission of CompTIA’s Blockchain & Web3 Advisory Council, which O’Neal serves as co-chair.

“We’re trying to make sure that we speak about utility first. How does it help their customers? How does it help them as a business?” O’Neal says. “If we don’t do that, we’re just going to be speaking over people’s head.” It’ll be a while before those efforts turn something currently exotic and new into a mainstream component of end user solutions, he continues, but perhaps not a terribly long while.

“I would say two years,” O’Neal predicts.

He and people like him actively adopting the technology today will be running competitive rings by then around everyone too busy to explore blockchain, IoT, or something else similarly leading edge at present, I suspect.

Gradient MSP and the spirit of the channel

Chances are you’ve read elsewhere by now that billing reconciliation and business intelligence vendor Gradient MSP has introduced a free pricing benchmark tool designed to help managed service providers compare their rates to those of peers. I’d like to zoom in here on the free part of the story, because it gets to something about the channel, CompTIA, and events like ChannelCon that I very much appreciate.

Gradient’s ambition for the new resource, in brief, is to give MSPs an objective basis for determining if they’re overcharging clients and losing share or (more commonly) undercharging and losing margin, based on data pulled from the $7 billion-plus of billing transactions the vendor views every month. The system, which Gradient originally planned to sell, is free of charge instead because a collection of vendors including Auvik, Barracuda, CyberFOX, Huntress, Keeper Security, Liongard, N-able, NinjaOne, and Sherweb chipped in money to underwrite it on behalf of their partners.

Now cynics could argue they did so because they figure MSPs who learn that they can safely charge more for products without paying more themselves will market those products more aggressively, and those cynics wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

“If you can make more money off of something, you’re going to sell more of it,” observes Colin Knox (pictured), Gradient’s co-founder and CEO.

Those cynics would also, however, be willfully ignoring the go-giver spirit of community that animates events like ChannelCon, where attendees routinely trade success tips with bitter marketplace rivals and withholding knowledge from people who need it is practically taboo.

I got into that spirit myself at ChannelCon, in fact, yesterday morning, when I co-presented a session on getting media attention. People seemed to appreciate the advice. Sharing it felt pretty good.

But it’s not just a ChannelCon thing, or even a CompTIA thing. The channel is filled with people like Knox grateful in a way that’s hard to fake that they work in an industry in which empowering, rather than fleecing, customers is the only way to win.

“The vendors in general all have a true commitment to and desire to help the MSPs be more successful, more profitable,” says Knox, who built Gradient from day one to be a business that makes more by helping MSPs make more too.

“To be able to help take the industry to the next level, help them uncover growth opportunities, profit opportunities, and make the business of being an MSP more sustainable, more profitable, and more prosperous was always our aspiration,” he says.

Near-term steps in that mission include expanding the pricing tool to benchmark services and service bundles, and segment data by variables like company size and location. Later steps will involve rolling out more free business-building tools.

“We want to expand into other areas of benchmarking for MSPs and their business performance and category performance,” Knox says. “What are their growth rates like? What are their client acquisition rates like? What are their retention rates like? What are their profit margins like?”

Sounds useful. I hope some of it ends up being free.

The 20 buys big

Forgive me for returning yet again to a theme I’ve touched on multiple times just within the last couple of months, but there was a development this week in the “platform grab” creating mega MSPs that’s worth discussing briefly.

The aforementioned platform grab (a useful term coined by Abraham Garver of FOCUS Investment Banking) is a still nascent process in which multi-MSP rollups (aka platforms) are themselves rolling up to produce MSPs with international reach, thousands of customers, and massive payrolls.

One of the platforms poised to join in, called The 20, took a step toward mega status this week, but before I discuss what they did and why it matters, I need to provide a few words of context about a unique and complex company.

As we’ve noted before, The 20 is actually two organizations in one, a master MSP called The 20 Group and a fully integrated MSP platform called The 20 MSP. Members of The 20 Group share standardized processes and tools, a 24/7 NOC and SOC, centralized lead generation, and more. Eventually, top performers receive an acquisition bid (funded by cash flow and bank loans, not private equity) from The 20 MSP.

Typical rollups put as much as a year of hard work into aligning newly purchased companies with platform-wide standards. The 20 does almost all that work—on the MSP’s dime—before an acquisition, allowing it to complete post-sale onboarding in a few quick weeks.

That brings us—at last—to this week’s news. The 20 has acquired Collabrance, a master MSP created and previously owned by GreatAmerica Financial Services, for an undisclosed sum. The deal adds roughly 100 MSP members to the 150 or so already in The 20 Group. More importantly, however, it also eliminates a giant barrier to entry for would-be newcomers, who until now have had to adopt The 20’s Kaseya tool stack.

“If somebody is on ConnectWise and they have a year and a half left on their contract, it’s hard for them to eat that,” observes Tim Conkle (pictured), The 20’s CEO. Collabrance uses tools from both ConnectWise and N-able, so MSPs unable or unwilling to embrace Kaseya instead needn’t do so until they’re ready or get bought by the rollup.

As a result, The 20 can now compete with other platforms for a whole new bunch of previously unreachable MSPs. “It opens up another channel for us,” says Conkle.

Collabrance members will come out ahead too, he continues. “Collabrance doesn’t do Mac support. They don’t do 24/7,” notes Conkle. The 20 does, and it has locations in more places too, which will make serving SMBs with satellite offices and business partners in multiple cities easier.

“You’re able to say, ‘hey, we can touch every square inch of the U.S. no matter where your office is,’” he notes.

That’s something The 20 would like to say someday too. “We want a national footprint,” Conkle says. “We want to cover every square inch of the U.S. and then we want to cover every square inch of Canada.”

Buying Collabrance accelerates Conkle’s path to that goal, as well as a sale of his own someday to an even bigger platform hungry to go mega. Don’t look for that deal to happen any time soon though.

“We’re not there,” Conkle says. “There’s still a lot of dreaming left to dream and I’m still dreaming.”

Si Se Puede!

Turns out the secret to business intelligence is a combination of knowing how your company is performing and believing in yourself enough to put that knowledge into action. Hear all about it on this bonus episode, sponsored by SuperOps, of the podcast I co-host.

Just because I find it interesting

And because where else can I talk about it but here? A few stats I came across this week:

• CompTIA recently published a list of the nine highest-paying certifications in IT. Would you have guessed, given how badly security expertise is needed and how hard it is to find, that the three security certs on the list would be numbers seven, eight, and nine, comfortably behind “Certified ScrumMaster”? (And yes, I had to look up ScrumMaster on Google too).

• Small businesses are big targets. According to new research from Barracuda, large organizations (defined as 2,000 or more mailboxes) got about one phishing threat per mailbox over the prior year. The smallest firms studied, by contrast, got six.

• Remember when I told you there’s big money to be made in AI infrastructure? Experts like Dell’Oro Group are starting to measure it in sums that start with “T”.

Also worth noting

• CompTIA used ChannelCon to announce new career planning resources for current and potential tech workers.

• Trend Micro is adding deepfake detection functionality to its Vision One platform (and not a minute too soon at that).

• ESET has a cloud version of the MFA module in its ESET PROTECT platform.

• Veeam’s data cloud now supports Microsoft 365 Backup Storage.

• Hornetsecurity’s 365 Total Backup solution for Microsoft 365, meanwhile, now supports Microsoft Planner.

• SentinelOne’s new CISO is about as respected a name in security as there is.

• GoTo Connect users can now interact with users where 100 million of them live all day, in WhatsApp.

• WatchGuard has tempted Derek Maggiacomo away from SonicWall to be VP of Americas sales, persuaded Rich Workman of Sophos to be VP of global renewals sales, and closed Karen Ray of Juniper Networks on becoming global VP of field and partner marketing.

• Adlumin has lured Vikram Ramesh away from Google to be its new CMO.

• Reinvent Telecom has rolled out a next-gen, cloud-native unified communications and collaboration platform for its white-label and co-branded resellers.