Evergreen Services Group Steers its Own Course to AI
The MSP rollup is experimenting with customized deployments of third-party tools to build the AI-first MSP of the future.
The Shield Technology Partners strategy for capitalizing on AI in managed services sounds sensible enough, right? Does it point the way forward to a major new development in managed services?
“It’s really tough to tell,” says Ramsey Sahyoun, co-founder of Evergreen Services Group, one of the MSP rollups you’ve met here before. “I think it comes down to what happens after they buy the companies and how well those companies perform—how well they retain and serve customers, what their strategy is around operating the businesses.”
Which only time will tell and could end up either way, Sahyoun (pictured) continues. But he has some doubts going in. Though people have tried, he says, there aren’t a lot of instances out there of service providers successfully creating proprietary software.
“It’s expensive to build and maintain quality technology products and run a services business,” Sahyoun says, a problem made more acute by the fact that software makers have greater cash flow to fund R&D with than a services business.
“Your addressable market would only be the businesses that you own, so you just have a lot less capital coming in. Whereas somebody that has business coming in from all the MSPs in the world gets a lot more capital to innovate and support their technology,” Sahyoun says. “I just don’t know that it scales.”
Or that it’s necessary, he adds. “I think we could see a lot of innovation coming out of the third-party tools.” We already are, in fact, he continues.
“There are a few existing tools out there—I won’t get into name-dropping vendors—that I think are pretty game-changing,” Sahyoun says, adding that Evergreen will test highly customized deployments of two such tools in the field soon, and more perhaps later.
“We have over 100 MSPs, so we’ve got a very high number of experiments that we can run,” he notes.
Evergreen will be experimenting with AI-native business models in addition to AI-native software. “We’re going to take a couple of our MSPs and rebuild them from the ground up in an AI-native way, with a completely new team. Completely rip out everything you think you know about how an MSP should run and rebuild it from first principles,” Sahyoun says. His expectation is that a highly effective model for building the AI-first MSP of the future will emerge from that trial and error.
“It’s our job to figure out how we apply that to the rest of the operating companies,” he says.
Spot on; it's truely difficult for service providers to build and maintain proprietary tech when so much innovation is happening with third-party tools.
Solid perspective on the build-vs-buy debate in the MSP rollup space. Sahyoun's point about capital constraints makes alot of sense - service businesses just dont have the same R&D runway as pure software plays. The experimentation model across 100+ MSPs is smart because it lets them test without betting the whole portfolio on one approach. What Im curious about is how they'll handle the cultural change when rebuilding those MSPs from first principles - thats often where these transformations stall out, not on the tech side.