Want in on AI Fast, MSPs? Maybe You Should Outsource Everything Else.
MSP-as-a-Service from Summit Holdings aims to offer MSPs an easy way to free up time for AI innovation by outsourcing traditional device, network, and cloud management chores.
MSP vendors aren’t the only companies eager to sell AI-native solutions. A lot of MSPs, including some extremely large ones, are as well. How much easier would it be for them to acquire skills, envision offerings, perfect a sales motion, and more if they didn’t have to deliver increasingly commoditized bread-and-butter endpoint, network, and cloud management services at the same time?
Come to think of it, how great would it be for AI-forward service providers if they didn’t have to deal with any of that old school hassle at all?
As of last week, they don’t, courtesy of MSP-as-a-Service, a new venture from investment and operating company Summit Holdings that will happily do all of that work for them on an outsourced per-user, per-month basis.
Subscribers, according to Summit co-founder and CEO Juan Fernandez, simply pick their tool stack of choice from a menu of some 60 RMM, PSA, backup, security, and other applications.
“We build it, we organize it, and we operate it for them,” he says. As them, he adds, meaning white label via NOCDOC, a 24/7 U.S.-based NOC and SOC vendor Summit bought last year.
“We quiet the noise for them,” Fernandez (pictured) notes.
And not just help desk noise, it’s worth noting. MSPaaS helps with pre-sales engineering, client onboarding, and QBR delivery, chores few of the offshore outsourcers serving MSPs for years can handle.
“They serve a purpose to answer the phone and to do ticket triage,” says Fernandez of such firms, “where we’re actually operating the platform.”
The appeal for would-be AI consultants is obvious. “They don’t really have to do much other than just manage and operate their business and migrate into the future,” says Fernandez.
And do so while turning a profit, he adds. Without getting deep into specifics, Fernandez says the scale MSPaaS operates at enables it to price its services low enough for MSPs to make 30-50% margins while charging about 30% less than prevailing market rates.
“We wanted to make sure we could build this bridge, stabilize the foundation, and make it super affordable and profitable for them so that they could actually make some money at doing this, and for the first time, work on their business and not in their business,” Fernandez explains.
MSPs migrating to AI are but one of several markets MSPaaS hopes to penetrate. Private equity firms looking for a consistent, easily deployed, and profitable way to build rollups are investigating the service too, according to Fernandez, as are resellers and telco service providers in search of a fast track to opening a managed service practice.
“It’s zero to done,” he says. “They can move quicker and deploy value to their customer base without the implementation, the conversation, the contract, and all the other things. We end up compressing that down to moments versus months.”
For now, Fernandez won’t specify any of his several dozen strategic vendor partners, all of whom are integrated with his back end infrastructure at the kind of depth required to make a rapid-fire, mix-and-match offering like MSPaaS possible. But he’ll begin parting the curtain on their names soon, he says, in conjunction with a stream of new feature rollouts set to unfold across the rest of the year.
“This is just the built first building block,” Fernandez says. “We have a lot coming in the future, almost something every month.”