Meet 'The Evolvers': The Partner Masters

It's one thing to report on how IT service providers (ITSPs), including MSPs, CSPs and ISPs, keep evolving. But it's quite another thing to actually help channel partners who read this column to improve their practices, grow their businesses and increase their profitability. Nothing could be more important, more valuable or more compelling to a channel veteran like me.

That's why this instalment of The Evolving MSP begins a new subseries, "The Evolvers." These are companies who make their expertise available to all channel partners to coach, advise and help them develop their businesses. More and more such firms have been emerging over the past few years. Our effort here will be to identify those that have won the respect and appreciation of many of their clients. Those readers who are seeking assistance in growing their business will find great resources in this subseries.

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on May 01, 20250 comments

GTIA Steps Into the Channel Spotlight

The newly christened Global Technology Industry Association (GTIA), formerly part of CompTIA, held their Communities & Councils Forum (CCF) from earlier this month in the beautiful city of Chicago. There are currently six advisory councils composed of members serving as advocates and educators to accelerate adoption of technology solutions. They are:

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on March 31, 20250 comments

The Rise of the Channel Toolsmith: How Vendors Became MSP Enablers

Many think the statement, "Every company is a software company," was first said by Satya Nadella. However, he was quoting Watts S. Humphrey, widely considered "the father of software quality," from his 2001 book Winning With Software: An Executive Strategy.

It's never been a mystery that great software drives all computing. When IBM first introduced its IBM PC in 1981, it made sure to publish the popular VisiCalc software under its own label. This is the software that launched Apple Computer's first success. For hardware sales to grow, you needed software sales to grow.

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on March 10, 20250 comments

CompTIA's Channel Arm Becomes the GTIA

Are you evolving as a partner? Are we, as a channel, evolving? When we decided to change this column's name a few years ago from "The Changing Channel" to "The Evolving MSP," it was meant to recognize that the channel had changed sufficiently and that "resellers," "VARs" and others had been pretty broadly replaced by managed service providers (MSPs). Just as the original name was meant to emphasize that "changing" was a key characteristic of the channel, the new name was meant to emphasize that "evolving" is what every MSP needed to do, and keep doing from now on. Evolve or vanish.

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on January 29, 20250 comments

What's Going On at CompTIA Now?

In March on this blog, I asked, "What's Going On at CompTIA?" I ended by saying, "I'm hoping some of the heroes who serve on the board will reply to this and tell me just how wrong I am."

To his credit, CompTIA Chief Community Officer M.J. Shoer did take the time to reach out to me and we discussed my concerns at length. He pointed out that the results of one of CompTIA's recent surveys found that 85 percent of its members refer to themselves as an "MSP."

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on December 19, 20240 comments

It's Time for a Better Way To Do P2P

Those who believe that the goal of every MSP is to become an MSSP are completely missing the mark. Those who believe partners are not to be trusted do not know how to partner properly. And those who believe they need to be all things to all people are out of their minds, and doomed to failure.

Partner-to-partner (P2P) partnering has been a major element of the Microsoft partner ecosystem since time immemorial. In 2009, Microsoft all but forced partners to declare their specialties or hire a whole lot more people to continue to qualify for more of them. Partners saw the sense in partnering with other teams whose expertise was not the same as their own.

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on September 25, 20240 comments

Welcome To the Post-Verticalization Era for Partners

The recent CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage raises an issue that all technology service providers should consider carefully: Are we doing enough for our clients?

Blend into that thought the dark, underlying vulnerability lurking beneath the wave of AI: the issue of copyright infringement.

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on August 27, 20240 comments

Coping with Copilot

Earlier today, I received an e-mail from Microsoft Copilot. What grabbed me about the e-mail was not who it was from, but its subject line: "Built to do the impossible." When I opened the e-mail, the headline that jumped out at me was similarly bold: "A new AI era begins."

Wanting to learn more, I started surveying everything Microsoft has put online recently about Copilot. I was intrigued to find still more audacious claims, including:

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on June 20, 20240 comments

The Evolution of Channel Citizenship

Regular readers may remember that this column was called "The Changing Channel" until 2017 when it became apparent, at least to me, that the channel had changed, and many things would need to be redefined as the new generation of managed service providers (MSP) began to evolve.

One of those changes was in how MSPs would need to market themselves and their practices similarly to other professionals -- lawyers, accountants, architects, etc. After all, their businesses are now all about marketing and selling their own services to their customers rather than leading with the products as they had when they were resellers. Postcards, posts, fax blasts and highly-designed e-mails were all becoming things of the past. Networking, professional referrals, speaking engagements and other professional promotion processes will prevail.

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on April 25, 20240 comments

What's Going On at CompTIA?

Longtime readers of The Evolving MSP will remember that I spent considerable time (and love, blood, sweat and tears) with the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP). The IAMCP's biggest challenge was the fact that it's an all-volunteer organization; everybody there also had a full-time job in a company in our very, very busy channel.

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on March 25, 20240 comments

The Most Important Document for Partners To Read Now: CSF 2.0

Ask your customers this question: "What do you think it means that the National Institute for Standards & Technology (NIST) just expanded the scope of its Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) to go beyond 'critical infrastructure' to instead apply to all companies and organizations?"

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on March 04, 20240 comments

Post-$3 Trillion Market Cap, Where Do Partners Stand with Microsoft Now?

Change is the only constant. That quote is commonly attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, but nowhere does it apply more completely than Microsoft. In the 43 years I've been involved with Microsoft, change has been nonstop -- sometimes blinding, often confounding, deeply frustrating and always challenging. But one thing has remained constant.

Jon Shirley, who assumed the mantle of Microsoft president in 1983 after being at Tandy for 25 years, was the first Microsoft executive -- but certainly not the last -- who ever said to me, "The most important thing to us is that you get the most out of your Microsoft relationship." Since then, I have had the same sentiment expressed to me by Steve Ballmer, Sam Jadallah, Allison Watson, Phil Sorgen, David Willis, Margo Day, Chris Capossela, Eric Martorano, Pam Salzer, Kati Quigley, Pattie Grimm, Gavriella Schuster, Rodney Clark and a host of Microsoft Partner Account Managers (PAMs). It is the one and only thing -- and perhaps the most important thing -- I can think of that has been constant throughout the past 40 years.

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on February 08, 20240 comments