Digital Transformation: Beyond "Lift and Shift"

Previously, I discussed the importance of MSPs expanding their product portfolio to sustain long-term, strategic relationships with their clients’ senior stakeholders. Increasing the breadth and depth of service innovation within a modern cloud ecosystem provide a great opportunity for MSPs to cross & upsell to existing clients and win new customers. In this article, I'm going to dive deeper into the practical consideration relating to MSP portfolio expansion focused on digital transformation and professional services.

For many MSPs, with roots in infrastructure managed services, deciding exactly how much of a bite to take out of the digital transformation apple can be a dauting prospect. A comprehensive digital transformation service offering is heavily biased toward professional services and may require a significant overhaul of the MSPs operational practices which can be time consuming, expensive and pose a risk to the "business as usual" operations.

In addition, customers are often unfamiliar with the capabilities and benefits of the latest cloud services so providers needs to take them on a journey of discovery towards newer, more efficient ways of working based on these technologies. This can be a new "go to market" experience for managed service providers as they will need to develop a range of customer workshops to establish their digital transformation credentials. These will normally be categorised as discovery workshops, run by the presales team, followed by assessment and planning workshops run by the solution design team. Discovery workshops focus on education and the "art of the possible" and give the presales team the best opportunity to establish the MSP's credibility as a digital transformation service provider. Assessment workshops enable the solution design teams to learn more about the clients' existing environment and formulate a high level business plan for change. Planning workshops are often chargeable engagements and focus on the specific scope and objectives of a digital transformation programme.

There are also many components to delivering transformation services and deciding which to incorporate into your portfolio needs to be based on a detailed understanding of your customers' requirements, your in-house expertise and your partner ecosystem. Extending reseller arrangements to incorporate new business application services through a network of SaaS vendors and specialist digital transformation & developer partners can deliver a quick “time to market” option and minimise the financial risk associated with launching new business application products using internal resources.

For new offerings that are delivered by in-house teams, I highly recommend building solution templates to automate the deployment of standardised application and infrastructure environments. This enables repeatable service delivery with increased speed and accuracy for your transformation activities.

Re-factoring application workloads onto cloud native SaaS platforms, requires a product driven approach, with functional consultants and developers working with clients to deliver process automation improvements. Using "commercial off the shelf" SaaS platforms or custom software solutions here makes sense but deciding exactly which application platforms to incorporate into your portfolio is a complex undertaking and I'll discuss that further in a later article.

In the case of modern workplace solutions, the focus is on team collaboration, productivity & engagement and most requirements can be fulfilled by optimising your clients’ Microsoft CSP license usage. Modern workplace requirements are, to a large extent, sector agnostic so MSPs should offer professional and managed services built around in-house functional consultancy and development capabilities across the Microsoft M365 ecosystem.

When it comes to infrastructure operations, most MSPs have already incorporated some elements of cloud re-hosting services into their portfolio. This enables MSPs to “lift and shift” existing workloads into private and public cloud infrastructure. However, fewer have embraced a comprehensive re-platforming offering based on modern devops practices. Re-platforming focuses on optimising serverless endpoint & application runtime environments, managing security, governance & compliance and software life cycle management using cloud native technologies. When launching a modern infrastructure re-platforming service, it makes sense to enhance existing operational capabilities with an in-house devops team.

Expanding your MSPs product professional services portfolio is the key to re-energising organic growth. However, it is a complex undertaking and working with an experienced MSP CTO advisor will help maximise your chances of success.

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