Using OpenClaw: Things to Consider as an MSP

With many publicly declaring OpenClaw to be the next evolution of autonomous AI agents acting as your full-time assistant, given that you are an Evolving MSP, it seems appropriate for you to be leading the change into this next evolution! So let's dive into what OpenClaw is all about and how you can benefit from it.

Since OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, many of you may have questions about the future. Let's address some of these:

• What will become of OpenClaw? It will live in open source and OpenAI has committed to providing full support.
• Why did OpenAI hire Peter Steinberger? They beat Anthropic and Google to him and made the best offer. Given what Steinberger accomplished in just a few days from Clawdbot to Moltbot to OpenClaw, imagine what he can do with more time and the resources of a frontier model maker behind him. I'm sure we can look forward to more interesting news coming up about him.
• Should we experiment with OpenClaw or wait to see what Peter Steinberger does with ChatGPT? This one is really up to you. You can anticipate that whatever he does will at least resemble what he did with OpenClaw, so working with it can give you early experience with the technologies. But I wouldn’t encourage deploying OpenClaw for customers at least until OpenAI demonstrates that it is now safe and secure.

OpenClaw has gone from curiosity to crisis at a speed that MSPs simply cannot ignore. Within weeks it amassed roughly 145,000 to 150,000 GitHub stars, with analysts noting that “OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot hit 150,000+ GitHub stars in 72 hours.” This surge signaled a shift from experiment to mainstream production. One security study found that 22% of enterprise OpenClaw deployments were unauthorized and that more than half of those ran with privileged access, while token and configuration leaks have been observed “in hundreds of misconfigured instances.” CyberArk calls it “an early view of the identity-focused risks” that enterprise agents will bring, while Fortune quotes one CTO saying, “The only rule is that it has no rules… that game can turn into a security nightmare.”

OpenClaw itself is an open-source, autonomous AI agent framework that grew out of earlier projects known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, originally built by independent developer Peter Steinberger to show what happens when you let an AI actually do things on its own machines rather than just chat.
It is unusual because it combines several ideas that were previously separate: it runs as a persistent local or cloud service, has long-term memory and scheduled tasks, and can plug into a wide range of tools, including messaging apps, browsers, CRMs and code repositories, while orchestrating external language models behind the scenes.
Its creator, Peter Steinberger, pitches it as a bet on “specialized intelligence,” arguing that hostable, hackable agents like OpenClaw are a better path than chatbots. Early adopters seized on that flexibility to wire it deeply into their workflows. That same mix of openness, the ability to host and broad integration is precisely what makes it different from a typical SaaS copilot and why security researchers now treat it as a landmark case in how fast an autonomous agent can escape the lab and reshape real environments.

So, to what extent should you consider using OpenClaw? Think of OpenClaw as a training ground, not a production tool. You need hands-on experience with agentic behavior, but under controlled lab conditions. That means trialing it in a segregated environment, under its own low-privilege identity, pointed at non-critical systems, test tenants and synthetic data.
You let your engineers see what it actually does when it can call tools, hit APIs and persist in actions over time. This also introduces friction on purpose, requiring approvals for anything potentially destructive or financially binding, clear logging and a simple, well-documented kill switch.
CyberArk’s advisory outlines what you would want to avoid when using OpenClaw for the first time: a developer installs OpenClaw on a corporate laptop, it inherits local privileges and access to SSH keys and source repos, and suddenly you have “a high-risk gateway where autonomous agents operate outside the oversight of traditional IAM controls.” Your goal should be to learn from that scenario without ever living it.

With customers, your stance should be less “Should we roll this out?” and more “How do we recognize and domesticate it when it shows up?”
The reality is that departments are already experimenting. Bitsight and others describe OpenClaw as “gaining rapid adoption” across business environments, often deployed by individual teams rather than through formal procurement. VentureBeat frames this as part of a broader “OpenClaw moment” where autonomous agents start to displace SaaS seats and human headcount, creating what it calls a “SaaSpocalypse” for traditional software models. Your value here is to intercept the experimentation before it becomes an incident. That starts with adding explicit questions about OpenClaw and similar agents to your assessments and onboarding. It continues with a repeatable engagement:

• Discovery of where the agent is running, what it can touch, which identities and secrets it holds, and who “owns” it today.
• Redesign to narrow its scope, reduce its privileges, wrap it in monitoring and governance, so it becomes a bounded, supportable component instead of a rogue script.

You want to help the customer get from the point of 'shadow AI script on a dev box' to 'bounded agent with a clear mandate' without pretending that the genie can be put back into the bottle.

We now know how best to use OpenClaw, but the question remains: is it secure? Expert opinion on security is both divided and useful on the topic. On the enthusiast side, David Heinemeier Hansson describes OpenClaw as “giving AI its own machine, long-term memory, reminders and persistent execution,” and calls it “a sneak peek at a future where everyone has a personal agent assistant.”
IBM researchers, looking at the same phenomenon from the other side, argue that OpenClaw shows community-driven agents can achieve “true autonomy” without being vertically integrated by big tech. “Fair point,” notes The Biggish, “if you’re running it on a laptop with no corporate access.”
But the security voices have been louder. Cisco’s analysis describes OpenClaw’s trajectory as “the largest security incident in sovereign AI history,” highlighting nine vulnerabilities in a single popular skill and warning that “there are no sufficient guardrails” in the default architecture. CyberArk’s team writes that “OpenClaw’s tooling itself isn’t enterprise-grade,” but that it “offers a useful blueprint for understanding how autonomous agents can affect enterprise security,” precisely because it shows how quickly identity-related risks appear when agents “operate with broad permissions and unpredictable behavior.”

Fortune quotes Ben Seri of Zafran Security saying, “The excitement about OpenClaw… is that it has no restrictions… The only rule is that it has no rules. That’s part of the game,” and then spells out the obvious conclusion: the same lack of rules that thrills hackers and indie builders “can turn into a security nightmare” for enterprises.
Two issues of particular concern:

• Shadow AI and unauthorized deployments
  Token Security found that “22 percent of enterprise customers had unauthorized OpenClaw deployments” and that over half of those had privileged access. CyberArk calls this “shadow AI,” where an employee installs an agent “on a developer’s laptop or within the corporate network” and hooks it into Slack, Teams, Salesforce, or other systems, creating a high-risk gateway that sits completely outside standard IAM and changes control workflows.

For you, that means your threat surface now includes tools you never sold, never approved and may not see until the day that something goes wrong. Your response is to assume their presence, discover them proactively using agent scanners where appropriate and bring them under policy, rather than pretending they shouldn’t exist.

• Privilege, identity and exposure of secrets
  Multiple studies have shown OpenClaw instances exposing API keys and OAuth tokens in dashboards and logs, with Palo Alto documenting “hundreds of misconfigured instances” leaking credentials, and The Biggish reporting that the platform “has no built-in sandboxing.”

CyberArk’s mapping of the attack surface points to a familiar pattern: agents often require high local privileges to be useful, so a compromised OpenClaw instance can read SSH keys, modify source code or pull sensitive data at machine speed.
BitSight’s and Bitdefender’s advisories also highlight how attackers abuse central hubs like ClawHub to gain initial access, then move laterally by riding the agent’s privileges into messaging apps, calendars and web content. In plain terms, the agent becomes a concentrated bundle of secrets and access rights so once an attacker gets it, they get everything it can reach.

Installation and operations are where you turn this from theory into a repeatable service. The mainstream OpenClaw story is “one‑liner install, connect your tools, unlock magic,” and tutorials show exactly that: a shell or PowerShell bootstrap that pulls down a bundle, then quick configuration of messaging and model integrations.
That is fine for enthusiasts, but not for regulated customers. You should insist on seeing what the scripts do, pinning versions and running the agent under a dedicated, low-privilege account with confined filesystem and network access. Review where configuration and secrets are stored, how updates are applied, which ports are exposed and how backups and logs are handled.
The Biggish notes that OpenClaw’s architecture “doesn’t scale to enterprise without fundamental changes to privilege isolation and third-party skill vetting,” pointing to real incidents where malicious skills silently exfiltrate data via HTTP calls. That’s exactly the kind of configuration debt you will inherit when a customer says, “It’s already running—just make it safe.”

OpenClaw is the first widely visible example of what autonomous agents will look like in your customers’ environments. They're also a preview of the mess they create when deployed without governance.
The right MSP response is not to ban it outright or to turn it into an SKU. Instead, build a structured, reusable response. That means formalizing your own internal policy for experimentation, building a hardened lab and runbooks, adding explicit questions about OpenClaw-style agents to your assessments and packaging an AI Agent Hardening & Governance offer that can wrap around whatever tool a customer has already chosen.
As Mark Kraynak put it in Forbes, “OpenClaw showed the future of AI security, and it’s going to be rough,” because researchers could quickly demonstrate “complete remote exploitation” from its default posture. Your job as an MSP is to make that future survivable for your customers and profitable for you by being the ones who understand the agents, not just the headlines. As always, share your personal OpenClaw stories with me for future updates and insight!

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on February 26, 20260 comments

Make Actual Money with AI: The Agentic Engineer

At a recent channel trade show, I heard several channel partners asking one another, “Do you do AI yet?”
This soon raised a question for me: “What does that mean?” What does it mean to “do AI?” What exactly do you actually do to “do AI?” It’s not like you’re selling seats, licenses or subscriptions; there’s nothing to install or integrate. So what does an MSP do to “do AI?”

In December, I posted an article titled “New Agentic MSP Opportunities Emerge & Explode” in my Substack, “The Agentic MSP,” which focused on the large number of tools emerging that can be used to build your own AI practice.
This got me thinking about when the cloud was new. Many MSPs were confused about whether they should build their own cloud centers on their premises or if they should broker or buy and resell someone else’s cloud services. As AWS, Azure and Google hit the scene, that question was pretty well answered.

The Age of AI Presents a Different Opportunity

When cloud became popular, major system sales of servers, storage and related products became almost obsolete. Many resellers weren’t sure how to replace that lost revenue. Some considered transitioning their business into application development, but the skills required for AppDev would be very expensive to acquire. A large portion transformed into managed service providers (MSPs).
Now that AI is taking center stage, many are confused about how to incorporate it into their offerings. As I asked, “What does one do to ‘do AI’?” More precisely, how do MSPs make actual money with AI?
As I explored these questions, the obvious answer emerged that we would need to head back to ‘Broker, Buy or Build.” I actually first wrote about this last September in “AI Brings Us Back to Broker, Buy, or Build” in The Agentic MSP Substack. However, as AI adjusts rapidly, much has changed since then.
You may remember that, just over a year ago, we were talking about citizen developers. These are people with knowledge of their own business processes who use low-code/no-code (LCNC) tiled interfaces to assemble the software needed to support those processes by simply moving tiles around the screen. We often talked about how this took a substantial part of the load off software developers’ plates, freeing them for higher-level development tasks.
Since then, citizen developers are now, by and large, completing their transition from the LCNC platforms to using popular AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and others to create much of what they need. This ranges from simple business functions like writing emails, producing reports, creating marketing materials, simplifying workflows and much more.
It seems there's just not much opportunity for MSPs in that level of AI utilization -- but, please, read on!

Popular AI Misconceptions

Many people think the model functioning as a chatbot is the entirety of how people use AI. They know they can ask questions and get answers. Some refer to AI as “search on steroids,” mainly because that’s all they’re aware of.
Much has been written and said about the fear many other people have of AI. As it becomes increasingly autonomous, there’s a danger it could take over the world and wipe out the human race. You may find this hard to take seriously, but among those warning about this is Geoffrey Hinton, widely considered “The Godfather of AI.”

The AI Continuum

Perhaps the most generic misconception is that AI is a single thing existing at a single level. Actually, AI can be said to exist at several levels across a broad continuum. These levels include:

• Generative – Users instruct their AI platform to create various creative content, including text, images, videos, music and more.
• Assistive – The AI, usually a chatbot, assists the user in performing various tasks, performing research, summarizing large documents, and writing various documents.
• Collaborative or Copilot – The AI, still starting with a chatbot, uses tools to create various kinds of content in collaboration with the user. One popular example is using Anthropic's Claude to create new Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Claude is so adept at this that Microsoft decided to change the large language model (LLM) underlying Copilot for Microsoft 365 from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Claude.
• Autonomous – Using a dedicated interface or an integrated development environment (IDE), the user instructs an AI Agent to perform various tasks that may require multiple steps, including examination, evaluation, decision-making, planning and taking action to make necessary changes in the real world. Basic autonomous AI agents often interact repeatedly with the human-in-the-loop for further information and decision-support.
• Fully Autonomous – The role of the human-in-the-loop is solely to review results and approve or make change orders. The fully autonomous AI agent continues cycling, awaiting specific trigger events to resume its operation.

The Autonomy Paradox

When people like Godfather Hinton talk about their fear of an AI takeover and human demise, they are referring to these fully autonomous agents. The fear is that the lack of human supervision will leave these agents free to commit all manner of horrors.
The paradox is that, according to industry studies, fewer than 1% of current deployments feature fully autonomous AI agents. In other words, the thing we’re most afraid of is something nobody can find good use cases for.

The AI Skills Gap

As developers scale upward from chatbots to developing agents, they find they have people who are capable of “chatting” with AI, but what they really need are engineers who can architect and build the AI-based systems their company needs. Citizen Developers needed Software Developers for more complex projects, and they still do need someone in that role. Thus, the AI question in most companies is now changing from, "How do we get our people to use AI?" to, "Who is architecting the agents that will run our operations?"
These Agentic AI Systems bring several requirements, including:

• Perception & Grounding (The "Eyes and Ears")
• A true agentic system doesn't just wait for text input; it actively perceives its environment. Using Multimodal Input, it can ingest not just text, but images such as screenshots of errors, files in PDF, CSVs, MD and other formats, and system logs.
• The AI understands where it is. It knows, "I am operating in the production environment," or "I am looking at the Finance SharePoint." It does not hallucinate that it is in a void; rather, it is "grounded" in your specific business reality. This is referred to as Environment Grounding.
• Planning & Reasoning: The single biggest differentiator from a standard chatbot is that the system must be able to "think before it acts."

• Task Decomposition: The capability to take a vague goal and break it down into a step-by-step plan.
• Chain of Thought (CoT): The system must generate a hidden "internal monologue" where it justifies its decisions before executing them.
• Self-Correction: If a step fails, the system must possess the logic to retry or try a different method, rather than crashing or asking the user for help immediately.

• Tool Use & Action (The "Hands")
• An agentic system must be able to execute action, not just describe it. The system connects to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to read and write data. It doesn't just say "I sent the email"; it actually calls the email API to send it. It also has a "menu" of tools such as a calculator, calendar, CRM, and email and the intelligence to select the ideal tool for the right moment without human intervention.
• To assure safety, it includes "human-in-the-loop" checkpoints for high-stakes actions such as approving refunds or agreements.
• Memory & State Management
• Standard LLMs generally have amnesia. That is, they forget everything once the chat window closes. Agentic systems must remember.
• In the short term, it remembers where it is in a multi-step workflow. For longer term persistence in uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to store knowledge in a vector database so it can recall facts from months ago. It also logs its own past successes and failures to learn what worked previously.
• Critique & Reflection

Reliable agents have a built-in quality control layer. Before showing an answer to the user, a secondary internal process reviews it to assure it fully answered the user’s question and presented a response in the appropriate format. It also has hard-coded rules that override the model if it tries to do something it is forbidden to do such as deleting data or sharing private information.

The Agentic Loop

A system is only "agentic" if it can autonomously loop through this cycle:
Perceive → Plan → Act (Tool Use) → Reflect (Did it work?) → Remember.

The Agentic Engineer

This need for Agentic AI Systems creates a necessary new role with a new skill set-- the Agentic Engineer.
Here’s the broker, buy, or build proposition. To take full advantage of the substantial revenue available from building complex AI systems, you may decide to try to train your people on the skills I’m going to describe next, or you can seek to hire people who already have those skills.
But these people can be expensive, and the training is extensive so it’s going to take plenty of time and money to get yourself there.
If that won't suit you, you can opt to partner with or subcontract Agentic Engineers who are rapidly emerging in the marketplace. Just as with other partnering, these professionals are happy to join you on sales calls, talk to your customer to learn what their needs are and then to fulfill those needs. You get to impress your customers without spending a dime up front. Isn’t collaboration just great?

When do you need an Agentic Engineer?

There are several ways you can find opportunities among your existing customer base to engage an Agentic Engineer, whether for fun or profit. As with any other project, you need to learn what your customer is doing and what challenges they are facing. Three characteristics of project opportunities for Agentic Engineering include:

• Complexity: The task requires more than three steps of logic (e.g., "Read email, look up sender in Salesforce, check inventory, then reply"). Citizen developers struggle to make this reliable.​
• Connectivity: The solution requires writing data back to a system of record. Giving a chatbot "write access" without an engineer's security architecture (MCP) is a massive risk.​
• Consistency: You need the solution to work 99% of the time, not 80%. "Prompt engineering" alone hits a ceiling; "System engineering" is required to break through it.

When you believe you may be in the presence of such an opportunity, it’s time to reach out to your friendly neighborhood Agentic Engineer, partner up and invite them to join you on a sales call. They will ask the questions required to determine if the opportunity you think you have is feasible. They’ll then help you scope it, price it, propose It and close on the project.
As you go through your vetting process, remember that the critical first step once you’ve decided on a partner is to enter into a mutually beneficial documented agreement.

Vetting Agentic Engineers

As with all external skill sets, it’s important for you to carefully vet your candidates. Here are some aspects to look out for. This is a specialized technical role responsible for architecting and assembling AI systems. Unlike a "normal user" who chats with a chatbot, the Agentic Engineer must:

• Orchestrate Context: They meticulously engineer what data is fed into the model to ensure accuracy, reduce hallucinations and moderate operating expense.
• Build "Scaffolding": They build the code and logic around the LLM. This includes connecting RAG pipelines, defining tools via MCP and managing multi-step workflows where one AI agent passes tasks to another.
• Move from "Chat" to "System": They transition from asking questions in chat to designing repeatable, reliable systems through engineering.
• Advance Context Engineering: Design and optimize extensive system prompts and context injection strategies to ensure high-fidelity model responses.
• Build RAG Pipeline Architecture: Build and maintain RAG systems, ensuring the AI can accurately retrieve and synthesize proprietary data.
• Implement Agentic Tooling & MCP: Implement MCP to connect LLMs securely to internal APIs, databases and third-party software, enabling the AI read and write data rather than just passively retrieving info.
• Evaluate reliability: Create automated test suites, called "evals", to measure the accuracy and reliability of AI outputs before deployment thus moving from more casual "vibe coding" to engineered reliability.

The role of the Agentic Engineer is still actively being defined, so the terminology is still undetermined. One common term applied to this role is AI Orchestrator. This emphasizes the skill of managing multiple models, APIs and data sources to work in harmony.
The Agentic Engineer is responsible for designing, building and refining complex AI workflows that go beyond simple chatbots. This role bridges the gap between business needs and raw AI capabilities by engineering the context, connectivity and control required for enterprise-grade solutions. The Agentic Engineer you engage will need the following skills:

• Fluency in "Mid-Code": Proficiency in Python or TypeScript to write the "glue code" that connects LLMs to the real-world using frameworks like LangChain, AutoGen or raw API calls.
• Orchestration Logic: Ability to design multi-agent flows where a "Planner Agent" delegates tasks to "Worker Agents".
• Security & Governance: Understanding of prompt injection risks and data privacy boundaries when connecting AI to business data.

The New Essential Roler

The Agentic Engineer is the bridge between the raw potential of Frontier Models like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude and the specific reality of your business data. They are the builders who take perception, planning, action and memory and weave them into software that doesn't just chat but is able to actually do work.​
For assistance in locating potential Agentic Engineer partners, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on February 11, 20260 comments

Ultimate Partner and the Channel Strategy That Never Goes Out of Style: The Evolvers Series

When former Microsoft executive Vince Menzione left to create his own company, he named it Ultimate Partner. Here's why that's such a perfect choice.

Dawn of the Reseller Channel
Aug. 31, will mark the 44th anniversary of the introduction of the IBM PC, Model 5150. It was a magical time in what IBM had just dubbed "the reseller channel." Their policy was that nobody but IBM could sell IBM so we who were going to take the IBM PC to market were permitted to resell them, providing IBM with a channel to customers. Thus, the "reseller channel" was born and we all became "resellers."

By 1983, IBM released the IBM XT, which offered "eXtended Technology," and along with it came a cavalcade of monochrome and color displays, monochrome and color display adapters, and other components to expand the capabilities of the new machines.

IBM could not keep up with the demand for any of these products, and the flow of products became uneven. Color displays would become available, but no color adapters. Same for monochrome, and other components. Shortages of some products or others were constant, and we resellers found ourselves jammed with in-store inventory of some products but not the products to enable them. Incomplete orders piled up, creating serious cash-flow issues for many of the dentists, lawyers, former IBM-ers and others who had invested in these new computer stores and franchises.

Yes, these products could be sold at list price in those earliest days -- margins north of 41 percent. But those margins couldn't be realized unless we actually delivered the orders.

Partnering to the Rescue
At that time, I was working at a ComputerLand franchise in New York. All the franchisees were connected via TeleNet, an early text-only messaging platform. Short of adapters for several orders, I sent a message to all franchisees on TeleNet to see if anybody had any they could sell to me. We filled those orders almost immediately.

Such "horsetrading" instantly became constant. Every franchisee started posting messages seeking missing products to complete orders. Other franchisees shifted unmoving inventory out of their stockrooms to help their colleagues. Everybody working together solved cash-flow problems for everybody, and satisfied customers faster on the way.

In 2005 I was running The Computer Factory store in the Wall Street district of New York, certainly the most competitive market of all time for PC resellers. There were probably a few dozen of us within a two-mile radius of each other. And, yes, we were still running out of enabling adapters or displays, disk drives, memory cards and any of dozens of products. Compaq and Apple were inflicting the same shortages on us constantly.

As a former ComputerLand franchisee executive, I had a magic trick up my sleeve: I called a friend who ran another computer store nearby and asked if he had any of the adapters I was short of. He did. And he was glad to sell them to me at cost to get them off his balance sheet.

Soon, we and all our local competitors were partnering to keep products flowing no matter who and where we were sourcing them from originally. That partnership saved many of our companies from going out of business back in those early days.

The Next Generation of Partnering
Microsoft introduced the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) in 2010, replacing the Microsoft Partner Program (MSPP). Microsoft moved then-CVP of the Worldwide Partner Group Allison Watson to be Chief Marketing Officer of the U.S. Subsidiary, and then moved Jon Roskill, then CVP of U.S. Marketing, to become CVP of the Worldwide Partner Group. In other words, Microsoft gave them each other's jobs, then told both of them they had received a promotion.

One of the elements Roskill introduced with the new MPN was "the uniqueness rule." Previously, in the MSPP, any Microsoft partner could have any four of their employees take any test necessary to qualify for any Gold Competency. As a result, I found myself working for a company of 17 people that held more competencies than any other partner. No. 1 on the partner finder list.

The uniqueness rule changed the game. Now, anyone who took a test could not take any other certification tests. In other words, you needed four exclusive people for each Gold Competency you wanted. Since there were 30 competencies available at that time, the company I worked at would have had to go from 17 employees to over 120 people to continue to qualify for all the competencies we currently held. That wasn't about to happen.

As a board member of the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP) at that time, I was hurriedly called into a meeting with Jon Roskill, at which we discussed the damaging impact this uniqueness rule would have. Roskill explained that Microsoft wanted to assure customers that partners who delivered services to them were truly qualified to provide those services. They wanted us to each declare what we were best at and just focus on that.

We explained to him that those projects never consisted of just one service; we had to be able to provide many services for each project we undertook. Roskill's response was prophetic: "We want you to focus on what you're best at, and partner for the rest."

We convinced Roskill to give us a year to adjust to the uniqueness rule. During that year, the wisdom of Microsoft's guidance started becoming very obvious.

Roskill met with the IAMCP because we were seen as the core of P2P, partner-to-partner partnering, and he hoped we could guide the Microsoft partner ecosystem to adopt Microsoft's desired philosophy of focusing and partnering. I'm not about to tell you that we did what Microsoft wanted, but the ecosystem did figure it out for itself. We all began to promote ourselves as specialists in various segments of the services customers required, and we started to partner more and more enthusiastically with each other.

Soon, proactive partnering became the ultimate strategy we all employed to remain successful in satisfying customers and growing our respective businesses.

For me, the penultimate partnering project had come back in 1991 when Microsoft failed to adapt to the upcoming change in the commencement of daylight savings time (DST) on time. Late to realize that every Windows system in operation would have to be remediated to properly adapt to the change, Microsoft put us all into emergency mode trying to get every customer fully remediated.

At that time, I was working for a small Microsoft partner who had successfully attracted a customer base that was far too large for us to manage to remediate them all in time. I had recently joined and brought my belief in partnering with me. The company owner, however, held the very common view that inviting a competitor into their customers' premises was a potentially fatal error.

So, when I reached out to friends around the channel to send me people to help get my customers remediated, I simply didn't tell him. By the time he realized what I had done, we had all customers remediated and got out of the month intact.

When he called me to his office, I knew what I was in for, and he didn't disappoint. He yelled at the top of his lungs. How dare I use outsiders to remediate our customers? How dare I threaten our account control? How dare I overspend so terribly? When he stopped to take a breath, I was already smiling. I presented him with a long list of thank you notes from our customers for saving them from serious disruption, and with our income report for the previous month.

"Congratulations," I said. "You just enjoyed the most profitable month your company has ever had."

Ultimate Partner
If you find yourself to still be a nonbeliever in partnering now in 2025, you really need to meet Vince Menzione, watch his podcast, read his blogposts, and prepare to read his upcoming book, "The Ultimate Guide to Partnering."

The Microsoft ecosystem represents enormous opportunity, yet even today few Microsoft partners feel confident navigating it. Programs shift, competencies change, and hyperscaler politics make it difficult for MSPs to position themselves effectively, much less win executive attention. Partnerships often stall not because of lack of ambition, but because leaders can't align strategy, investment and access to the right relationships.

Menzione built Ultimate Partner to solve this problem. After a decade running a $4.6 billion U.S. public sector partner business for Microsoft, Menzione saw the same pattern repeat: organizations talking about partnerships without executing them at the leadership level. The result was wasted resources, missed opportunities and stalled growth. Ultimate Partnering turns that challenge into a business advantage for MSPs.

Menzione's model is straightforward. Ultimate Partnering brings Microsoft executives, hyperscaler leaders, ISVs, distributors and MSPs together in curated, high-value gatherings. These aren't large conferences where partners hope for chance hallway conversations. Ultimate Partnering events are designed so leaders have meaningful access to the people who matter. With two to three hundred participants, attendees regularly find themselves in real conversations with senior Microsoft decision-makers, hyperscaler strategists and alliance executives.

The outcomes speak for themselves. Partners report creating valuable new alliances, accelerating pending deals, and expanded pipelines as direct results of introductions made at Ultimate Partner. Sponsors emphasize that the audience consistently matches their ideal customer profile -- executives with decision-making authority. Companies like Crayon and AppPoint have built new strategic relationships through these events, creating measurable business impact.

For MSPs, the value is threefold: faster alignment with Microsoft strategy, direct engagement with executives who shape ecosystem priorities, and access to peers and ISVs who can extend their solution portfolios. The result is acceleration -- shorter sales cycles, stronger alliances and earlier insight into where the industry is moving.

Menzione is scaling the platform quickly. Ultimate Partnering will expand from two major events a year to three regional conferences across the United States, along with invitation-only pre-day sessions tied to Microsoft's flagship events. While Microsoft remains central, AWS and Google are increasingly included, reflecting the multicloud reality most MSPs now face.

For MSP leaders, the message is clear: Ultimate Partnering isn't another industry event. It's a business platform designed to put the right people in the room, generate measurable outcomes, and help partners scale. Those who engage gain influence, visibility and opportunity that would be nearly impossible to achieve alone. In a market where speed and relationships drive growth, Ultimate Partner gives MSPs the immediate advantages of being able to focus on their strengths while partnering for everything else -- the formula for success since the dawn of the reseller channel.

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on August 25, 20250 comments

How AchieveUnite Is Reinventing IT Partnerships: The Evolvers Series

• Related: Meet 'The Evolvers': The Partner Masters

Whether you're an IT vendor of hardware, software or services, or an MSP, CSP or other kind of ITSP, managing successful partner relationships has become much more complex and challenging than it was before the arrival of cloud computing -- and, even before that, the death-spiral of channel margins on products of all kinds.

Before then, vendors could gauge their best partners by the volume of sales they could bring. But as product sales became a less profitable and far more difficult proposition, and IT channel partners one after another either abandoned or at least minimized product sales as a profit objective, vendors have had to shift from volume expectations to the same value expectations partners have always depended on. What the value is of any particular IT channel partner to any other has become the prime concern in all directions. This may not, in the long run, be a bad thing.

In 2016, Theresa Caragol combined 20 years of experience working for legendary IT and communications companies such as IBM, Bay Networks, Nortel, Extreme Networks and others with her Georgetown University executive master's degree in business leadership and work across more than 50 countries in various channel roles, giving her direct experience with the challenges that IT companies face when building partner ecosystems.

Caragol recently published "Partnering Success: The Force Multiplier to Achieve Exponential Growth," which gained traction in business strategy categories. She's also a regular contributor to industry publications and speaks at channel events. She's involved with several industry organizations, including the CompTIA Channel Faculty for curriculum development, and serves as a facilitator for various channel-focused think tanks and councils.

With all this, Caragol built a new consulting and education firm focused specifically on channel and partnership development. She called it AchieveUnite, and its work centers on helping organizations navigate partnership challenges through education, assessment and strategic guidance in three main areas of service:

• People Development includes training programs for partner management, channel strategy education and leadership development. They've developed the Partner Quotient Index (PQI), an assessment tool that measures how effectively individuals build trust in business relationships, something they've identified as fundamental to successful partnerships.
• Advisory Services provide strategic consulting for partner program design, competitive benchmarking, and ecosystem strategy. This includes both quantitative assessments and hands-on guidance for execution.
• Growth Catalyst Programs focus on partner engagement through advisory councils, events and what they call "partner success experiences." These are programs designed to improve partner emotional intelligence and relationship building.

Over these past nine years, AchieveUnite reports having trained more than 7,000 professionals and worked with over 300 companies. Their client data shows improvements in sales cycle speed, deal size and partner utilization, with these results varying by organization and implementation.

AchieveUnite's Approach to Partnership Development
AchieveUnite's methodology centers on what they call "Partner Lifetime Value," which involves looking at partnerships as long-term relationships rather than transactional arrangements. They focus on three areas: developing people skills, optimizing partner relationships and improving program design.

Their Partner Quotient Index assessment is designed to measure trust-building capabilities, which they position as the foundation for effective partnerships. The tool provides organizations with data on how well their teams collaborate internally and with external partners.

The company has been incorporating AI tools into their offerings through what they call "Ignite AI," which provides insights into partnership strategies. They also maintain a learning platform called the AchieveUnite Partnering Success Hub for ongoing education.

Their recent trend analysis for 2025 focuses on the increasing importance of automation in channel operations and the need for stronger alignment between supplier and partner strategies as competition for market share intensifies.

Value for the Channel Community
For IT channel professionals, AchieveUnite represents an excellent approach to addressing common challenges: improving partner engagement, developing internal team capabilities and creating more effective partner programs. Their focus on measurable outcomes and systematic approaches to relationship building addresses issues that many channel organizations struggle with.

Their work spans both vendor-side channel organizations and partner companies looking to improve their own capabilities in working with multiple vendors and building their own partner networks. The company's emphasis on trust and relationship-building reflects broader industry recognition that successful channel partnerships require more than just contractual agreements -- they need genuine collaboration and aligned interests to drive results for all parties involved.

Channel Partnerships Have Never Been More Important
The relative roles of channel companies to each other have never been more important. Vendors no longer look upon MSPs and other channel partners as merely sales extensions of their companies. Now, they are strategic partners who deliver critical justification for purchase to the customers they seek.

Sales transactions are simple to execute but locating and identifying demand are critical and far more specialized. This has become the currency of the channel for vendors and service providers alike. AchieveUnite helps all channel citizens do exactly that.

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on July 28, 20250 comments

Channel Veteran Dan Wensley Named GTIA CEO

It has been a long time since the leader of the largest association dedicated to the IT channel actually came from the IT channel.

When Todd Thibodeaux became CEO of CompTIA in 2008, he came from 17 years of experience in the consumer electronics industry, not the computer industry. To his credit, Thibodeaux became deeply knowledgeable about our channel in a very short time and led CompTIA with distinction for another 17 years, culminating in the successful sale of the training and certification business that fueled the growth of the association to Thoma Bravo just about a year ago.

The sale resulted in an endowment that will fund the member association, renamed the Global Technology Industry Association (GTIA) for the foreseeable future. While this name is new, the organization enjoys a long and productive history starting as the Association of Better Computer Dealers (ABDC) in 1982, then renamed the Computer Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) in 1992, and today GTIA. With the sale of the training and certification business, Thibodeaux remains CEO of the newly for-profit CompTIA.

A New Day and New Leadership for a New Association
After a thorough and diligent search, GTIA has recently announced their new CEO.

Dan Wensley is well known in the channel community. His first major role came in 2000 when he joined MCI WorldCom with a mission to create their first reseller program in Canada. This was followed by him becoming Vice President of Marketing and Sales for one of the pioneering enablers of the MSP business, Level Platforms.

Dan joined the Board of Directors of CompTIA during that time, giving him 14 years of experience with the organization, including constant presence at the annual ChannelCon conference, at the time of his ascendance to CEO. Dan went on to become President of Passportal, which was acquired by Solarwinds, CEO at ScalePad, and CEO at WarrantyMaster, all well-known channel-leading companies. All told, Dan is a definitive citizen of the channel bringing 30 years of successful channel experience to his new role as CEO of GTIA.

When I asked Dan to share his vision for GTIA, he immediately pointed out that his initial presentation to the GTIA search committee was entitled "The Possible."

He then suggested that the resources accorded and the focus on certification and training side of CompTIA had long overshadowed the member association, limiting its visibility and perhaps delaying its growth. Dan acknowledges and appreciates the success Todd Thibodeaux achieved and points out that it is that success which has now fueled the growth and expansion of the member association basically forever.

"Let's do more for more," suggests Wensley. "Just bringing more members is not good enough. Just delivering more resources or assets is not good enough. We really look to define designed advantages or outcomes for the members and in a more tangible manner that maybe has been focused on before."

Four Areas of Focus for the Future
Dan defines four specific areas on which the new GTIA leadership will focus:

1. People
One big and important difference Dan describes in the new approach to people is to not only highlight the internal people who are hired by the association to operate it including himself, but also the members who participate in the direction and growth of the organization, most specifically those who serve on the member board of directors. He speaks of emphasizing who is serving on the member board, why they're serving, and why the entire GTIA community should be interested who is on that board, and consider the advantages of perhaps serving themselves.

2. Resources
Dan emphasizes the importance of delivering the resources that are desired by and will be extensively utilized by the members, delivering real value to them.

3. Community
Dan describes the importance of bringing the channel industry a real sense of community. "Many others," he explains, "are doing peer groups very well, but we're in the unique position, being a nonprofit, being vendor agnostic, having no other fighter in the game, other than to give back to the to the channel. I think we can be, and should be, and are obligated to be the community enablement organization."

4. Advancement
It is critical for GTIA to really drive tangible outcomes for the industry and every member.

Unlimited Funding
As mentioned earlier, the sale of the CompTIA brand and certification business resulted in an endowment to the member association that will conceivably fund operations in perpetuity. This means GTIA can serve the channel community without having to invest any time or distraction in fund-raising.

Dan acknowledges, "We absolutely have a fiduciary and fiscal responsibility, but to be unfettered by EBITDA requirements and be able to do things both on the philanthropy side and on the giving back community side, that that is going to be incredibly exciting."

He continues, "It's pure empowerment to not be constrained. There's always the aura of outside obligations. One of the challenges that I was faced with in conversation with the GTIA hiring committee was that I've always run for profit, fast growth software companies for the last 30 years. How do you think you're going to come in and run a membership organization and be successful at it?"

His reply? "A commitment to community was the cornerstone of building emerging technology businesses. To understand the value, the education, the sense of community, the listening, learning and advancing each other in the technologies we were delivering, and that that was what really resonated."

Why Channel Citizens Should Join GTIA
The immediate first response to the question of why channel members should join GTIA addressed the importance of thinking expansively.

"The first point there," replies Wensley, "is in utilizing the right acronyms. One of the first things I did coming in was to change us from an MSP nomenclature to an IT service provider (ITSP) nomenclature because it declared our need to immediately expand."

In doing this, Wensley accurately reflects the reality that the channel is evolving way past the original concept of the MSP. Already, Microsoft has created the role of Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and we're witnessing the explosion of Artificial Intelligence Service Providers (AISP), Data Service Provider (DSP) which includes data scientists being made available on a fractional basis. Following a model first witnessed in the medical industry, general practitioner MSPs are specializing in a growing variety of competencies that better define and focus their services and their markets.

Serving the Community of Communities
"I'd rather be just an enabler of other communities and be encompassing and supportive and help in any way that we can," explains Wensley. "With our funding and our structure, we're in a unique position to be able to do that without the constraints of competition in some obscure way. We're free of all that, you know, needing to think that way. We need to be the place where even emerging technologies companies come to before they can afford to go to other trade shows, because it is an expensive industry to be a vendor In. We can be the stepping stone to that and the constant resource for them moving forward."

Participation and relationship building are also important to him. Speaking of the upcoming ChannelCon show this summer in Nashville, Wensley points out, "I canceled the board meeting at ChannelCon and told the board members they have to be involved with the membership."

In closing, Wensley summarizes, "Throughout my 30-year career, the one most impactful component of being in the IT services industry has been the people. Innovation in technology alone has never moved us forward. It has been the people, the community, the conversation and working together, and I think that is the greatest asset that GTIA has, putting this community of incredible people together while we talk about the resources that are required to advance each individual member, their companies and their customers."

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on June 23, 20250 comments

Turning AI Hype into a Viable MSP Business Strategy

Generative AI has enjoyed faster adoption than any previous new technology. GenAI achieved almost 40 percent adoption within two years of introduction. Meanwhile, the Internet took five years to achieve 20 percent. Personal computers took three to achieve 20 percent.

All three were initially introduced as consumer products. PCs were initially sold through retail stores. The popular adoption of the Internet began with the arrival of Pizza Hut and 800-Flowers on the World Wide Web. GenAI, though, was introduced as something of a toy. It could write your letters and e-mails for you. It could make pictures of you appear more rugged, more muscular, more beauteous or more adorable.

Over the years, we've talked about the consumerization of technologies, but each of these three examples actually experienced the opposite. Given that all businesspeople are also consumers, they met these technologies as consumers and transitioned them to business. With the arrival of VisiCalc spreadsheet software, people immediately saw business applications and began using them. Word processors, databases, communications and other applications followed to support business adoption of PCs. Even before the advent of the Web, the Internet was providing communication and data sharing among universities and a few large corporations. The Web made this functionality available to a broader business audience. If consumers could order pizza and flowers over the Web, what couldn't they do? It didn't take long for Jeff Bezos to explode Amazon into unprecedented success.

AI, however, is proving to be more of a challenge, with many MSPs scratching their heads as to how exactly to monetize this new phenomenon.

The Nature of AI
Many MSPs have been led to believe that AI is an application unto itself, and that they need to figure out how to "sell AI." But potential applications of AI are so broad in scope that AI should never be seen as a standalone entity -- it is an enabling technology. It is, therefore, a component of improved applications that can do far more with far greater granularity and specificity than before. Where classic digital technologies were only capable of "true or false," "yes or no," "zero or one" or "on or off," AI enables shades of meaning in between. Inference. Influence. Shades of grey between the black and the white.

One of the earliest implementations of AI was the "recommender engine," which took a product database filled with features, benefits, reviews and other data regarding every product in a company's inventory and compared it against a customer database that included information obtained through social media listening, survey responses and interaction transcripts, as well as purchase histories and more. Based on inference from all these sources, the engine identified products that would most likely be of interest to each customer and sent them the appropriate marketing materials. Salespeople were then notified by the engine of the need to follow up on materials sent. Imagine being a salesperson armed with that kind of assistance!

Strategically Incorporating AI into Applications
In a January article in my column Practical AI in Pure AI magazine titled "AI Changes Our Relationship with Applications," I reported on how Applied Information Sciences (AIS) was improving on traditional applications by enhancing them with generative AI technologies. In that article, their VP of Cloud Modernization and AI Solutions described how these new applications served more as assistants that were far more interactive. Importantly, he also stressed that building one's own large language model (LLM) was far too expensive and time-consuming to be practical. Instead, he recommended identifying an existing commercially available LLM that could be adapted to the customer's requirements and enhanced with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) or similar technologies.

AIS, which has been providing IT services since 1982, has successfully incorporated GenAI into their offerings as a strategic advantage for their customers. That same VP also informed us that English would be the next great programming language, which should offer incentive to those MSPs who don't see themselves transitioning into application development.

The Tactical Approach to AI
Many MSPs are finding GenAI solutions coming from the software developers who create the tools they use in the course of delivering their managed services. Perhaps the most well-known is AIOps, in which AI technologies are used to augment the capabilities of network operations with more automation. GenAI can deliver predictive analytics for better systems maintenance, automated remediation of many common issues, optimization of various resources, and also automation of service desk operations.

In some cases, AI agents are replacing human agents in answering and processing customer call requests for servicing. This usually leads to faster triage and faster issue resolution, which increases customer satisfaction. AI also personalizes the customer experience, providing chatbots and other virtual assistants that can be far more responsive than human operators.

Cybersecurity and threat management vendors are also integrating more GenAI into their platforms, enabling network traffic analysis, anomaly detection and identification of potential threats far faster than human operators ever could. AI-enabled platforms are responding automatically to a wider range of anomalies and threats, freeing human operators to focus on more strategic improvements.

Business intelligence (BI) and analytics are dramatically accelerated. The time to actionable insights is slashed when GenAI is used to analyze vast amounts of operational data to identify trends and predict potential outcomes. This leads to better-informed, far-more-effective decision-making. Even cloud operations, including better control over costs, can be achieved by incorporating GenAI tactically.

It All Begins with Proactive Decision-Making
MSPs are best served when they gather their team for a careful discussion of where GenAI fits into their practices and how their offerings can be augmented. This is not fit for a trial-and-error methodology. Instead, begin with an analysis of what your customer base really needs. How could you offer them greater strategic advantage and greater value by applying GenAI technologies? How can you align your GenAI offerings with your skills base and available resources? What investments are you willing to make?

More and more analysts agree that AI is the future of the MSP channel. How you embrace it, how you deploy it and how you leverage it for your own operations, will all determine your success and your growth going forward.

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on June 02, 20250 comments

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.

The Microsoft Partner Ecosystem Is Large
Over the years, estimates of how many Microsoft channel partners exist have varied widely. At one point it was estimated there were over 700,000. At another, fewer than 400,000. Most recently, the approximate seems to be 500,000. At one time, there were complaints that many on the roster were not really partners but had applied for partnership to obtain the "Action Pack," which contained free-use versions of all the Microsoft products. That was a long time ago.

Partners who joined the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP) were considered to be the most committed, best informed and most successful partners in the Microsoft partner ecosystem. While the IAMCP has existed for more than three decades, there are only a few hundred members in this global organization. It is not, however, reasonable to assume that IAMCP members are the best informed or most successful partners; there are many, many others. Perhaps a few thousand out of a half-million!

The Best Objective Any Vendor Ever Assigned
Here's why being among the best informed partners is so important. Early in my career, I attended a Microsoft quarterly partner briefing (QPB) at which a Microsoft manager informed us that we now had a quota to fulfill. This was very surprising to all of us in attendance, and initially of some concern, as well.

That concern disappeared when the presenter said that Microsoft wanted each of us to produce at least $250,000 in services related to Microsoft products. Immediately, some of us realized that was something Microsoft had no way of tracking, and therefore couldn't possibly enforce. Then, the presenter explained, "We want each of you to focus on attracting projects that require Microsoft products, because we know that's the best way to maximize your deal size and profitability."

I will never know how many of my colleagues in that room fully appreciated how progressive and insightful that "quota" was. For me, it was Microsoft expressing how much they wanted to see partners thrive and grow their businesses. It was something I already knew, but this was wonderful reinforcement -- just not yet the best reinforcement.

Sometime later, I found myself in a conversation with then-channel-chief Allison Watson, who told me she was introducing Partner Account Managers (PAMs) to work directly with those partners who, like me, wanted more support. I had previously complained about having no direct contact to work with, and this was her solution. That was impressive enough, but then she said something that I'll never forget: "You see, Howard, we want to see each Microsoft partner get the most they possibly can out of their Microsoft relationship."

This one statement changed my relationship with Microsoft forever.

An Awful Discovery
At subsequent QPBs and Worldwide Partner Conferences (later Inspire conferences), I made the awful discovery that very few, if any, Microsoft partners I spoke with had received Watson's message. Neither did they know that Microsoft wanted them to maximize the value of their relationship, much less how. This is what drove me to join the IAMCP -- to help other partners realize what was available to them and how to obtain it.

Unfortunately, over the next 15 years, I would never feel that I had actually accomplished that to any great extent. I eventually moved on to write for and about the channel -- and that's what brings us here to The Evolving MSP.

In the subsequent conversations I have had with the many Microsoft channel chiefs and other executives, I have found that the intent to see partners get the most out of their Microsoft relationship is still strong in the Microsoft culture. This is great news.

The challenge is still the fact that only a fraction of the partner community knows this, and even fewer know how to actually make it happen. There is a need for guidance -- for someone who has learned how to work with Microsoft productively and efficiently, who understands how to maximize the relationship, and is willing to share that with those partners who understand the opportunity but need help getting there.

Meet 'The Partner Masters'
When I first met Justin Slagle, he was president of the IAMCP Southern California chapter, and I was president of the IAMCP New York chapter. At that time, he was also director of business development for a substantial Microsoft Learning Center Partner. Like me, Slagle deeply understood his Microsoft relationship and worked hard to exchange value with them in the way that most optimized partnerships.

In 2012, he went to work for Cindy Bates, then vice president of U.S. SMB & Distribution at Microsoft, helping to support some 50,000 SMB partners. He was quickly promoted to the Global Partner Solutions Team, where he was able to focus on just 500 partners. "I really, truly love and breathe the Microsoft mission of empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more," Slagle tells me, though he adds, "You can't empower partners if you're going from 50,000 to 500. Every year, we were dropping multimillion-dollar licensing partners from Microsoft management."

He relates how many partners messaged him on LinkedIn asking if they could pay him to help them. With five years under his belt as a Microsoft partner and 10 as a Microsoft channel development director, Slagle was ideally suited and more than qualified to provide such services. He approached his direct superior about an idea he and his closest friend, Matt Soseman, had to start a business specifically designed to help these Microsoft partners who were looking to optimize their Microsoft relationships. To his credit, that manager made it easy for Slagle and Soseman to test their idea and prove the concept to themselves.

In the spring of 2023, Slagle and Soseman launched The Partner Masters with a goal of adding two Microsoft partners to their client list every month. By the end of that year, they had added over 100.

You Don't Have to Be a Managed Partner to Enjoy All the Benefits
According to Slagle, what keeps partners from maximizing their partnership with Microsoft is the need to know all the programs that are available and how to take advantage of as many of them as possible. He likens it to tax specialists; any U.S. citizen can download the 5,500-page book on the current tax programs from IRS.gov, but who is really going to do so? Instead, they hire a CPA who has already learned what's in that book and can tell them all they can do to save as much money as possible on their taxes.

The Partner Masters knows the Microsoft version of that book intimately and assures all partners that you don't have to be a managed partner to enjoy all the benefits, including, he says, "Back-end rebates, cybersecurity, investment funds, all those things that are there, but you have to know that they're there, and if you don't, then Microsoft just keeps the profit."

Experience has taught them to go beyond what their Microsoft partner development manager (PDM) does for them. The PDM can inform them of available programs, but The Partner Masters offers the service of doing the execution on those programs to obtain the benefits for the partner.

Slagle describes their work with tremendous enthusiasm. "All you have to do is create an identity for me within your tenant. I'm going to go into Partner Center. I'm going to do all the claims. To do all the claims, I'm going to get the solution designation, I'm going to apply for all the funding for you, and you'll just see the money show up in your bank account. Does that sound fair? That's the big difference." He adds, "We have these managed partners coming to us because they don't have time to do this. We start helping them do all their things, and then all of a sudden, their numbers start skyrocketing."

An Expert at Doing What You Need Done
The greatest value The Partner Masters offers may be in simply knowing everything a Microsoft partner has available to them and how to obtain all of it. Add to that the availability of experts to do everything required to obtain all those benefits. Having lived on both sides of the equation -- as a Microsoft partner and as a manager of Microsoft partners for Microsoft -- I know The Partner Masters has truly mastered what it takes to be a very successful, very profitable partner.

To learn more about The Partner Masters and how they can help you enjoy greater return on your investment in your Microsoft relationship, contact [email protected].

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:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Channel Development
• Data
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• SaaS Ecosystem
• Workforce

In addition, several interest groups were highlighted at CCF:

• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Interest Group
• Managed Services Interest Group
• CyberSecurity Interest Group
• Advancing Women in Technology (AWIT)

Taken together, GTIA members have a broad selection of resources and areas in which to focus.

An Unprecedented Opportunity
The most striking thing about this event was the incredible enthusiasm of everyone in the room. There was lively conversation everywhere, much laughter, and a great deal of intensity at every presentation and every group meeting. Why are these people so enthusiastic?

The GTIA was created when the CompTIA brand of technology education products and programs were sold to Thoma Bravo and H.I.G. CompTIA will continue to operate, though now as a for-profit company.

GTIA was created from the industry trade association side of CompTIA. Based on the regulations governing how a nonprofit can sell of part of itself, an endowment was created to fund GTIA's annual budget.

The thing is, that endowment is enormous -- probably enough to fund GTIA in perpetuity. To hint at the enormity, it was announced at CCF that the philanthropic program at the former CompTIA had given $150,000 to worthy charities last year. This year, however, GTIA plans to triple that: $450,000 to charities. If you can afford to give away almost a half-million, you should be able to fund operations on the interest that principle will earn.

Why That's Important to You
Based on this endowment, GTIA never has to invest a moment in raising funds of any kind in any way. This means that 100 percent of the energy and talent embodied in this association will be focused on benefitting the IT channel -- you, the members.

That could be great, or it could be totally wasted. It all depends on who from our channel becomes involved in the organization. Looking at the councils and interest groups alone, it's clear there are many ways that anyone who wants to can get a lot out of putting in a lot.

A Leadership Example
Tracy Pound is the current chairperson of the member Board of Directors of GTIA. Her own ascent to that position tells a great deal about the opportunities awaiting GTIA members. As Tracy explained, "GTIA is a membership organization, and therefore is owned by its members. The board is representative of the membership of the trade association."

She went on to add, "The role of the board is to set strategy, and the role of the staff is then to execute on that strategy."

The staff she is referring to are the employees of the organization, most of whom moved along with CompTIA as it became a for-profit company.

Several years ago, I polled a large number of CompTIA members to ask them who actually ran CompTIA. Most replied that Todd Thibodeaux was in charge. I then pointed out that there was a member board of directors and asked who that was. Nobody knew. Thibodeaux was in charge of a large staff composed of people who had never worked in the IT channel. How could they be expected to direct and guide it?

At that time, the Chairman of the Board of Directors was M.J. Shoer who today has been hired by the organization and is working as Chief Community Officer. At this most recent CCF, I asked a few people who was in charge of GTIA. Most replied that Shoer was in charge, but only until a new CEO is hired. Shoer, who was an excellent board chairman, is also an excellent leader with infectious enthusiasm, a welcoming disposition and long experience working in our industry.

But nobody named Tracy Pound, despite her being the chair of the board. She absolutely sees that changing in the new organization.

Pound spoke of creating a clear route for every member to participate in leading the direction of GTIA. Regarding her own experience, she explained, "I count myself very lucky, because I have literally come up through that membership route. I started as a member of CompTIA. Back in 2012 I became part of the education faculty, and so I delivered and managed channel training. I would go and talk about our research at vendor events, at disti events and the like."

She continued, "I joined the UK Executive Council. From that I got noticed by people on the board and was asked to join the board." She completed the story by emphasizing, "I love the mission that we have, which is to be more professional in our industry, to add value to MSPs, to the channel. To help people grow their businesses, to learn more, to be better."

Regarding making members more aware of the role of the board of directors, Pound was very explicit. "There should be more presence so people know who the board are, and there are plans afoot to make the board more visible. We're going forward with a singular focus. It means that we're going to have people who are directly relevant to the channel, who can add value."

She then hinted at another more personal value available to those who seek leadership in GTIA. Regarding her own activities as chair, Pound said, "I speak at most ChannelComs [the annual GTIA conference]. I also speak at local events. I was in Benelux a few weeks ago on stage there. I'm going to be on stage in Ireland tomorrow. Then I'm going to Australia in September to do some training on managing the channel timed with a community event."

Regarding the Opportunity
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transition to a trade association that can truly be a support to people in the channel," Pound explained, "and we have to get that right. So, listening to members, we've done some town halls where we've taken a lot of questions in all the different regions, in different time zones to understand what concerns they have, what questions they have, what asks they have of the association.

"And we've taken that all in now. Timing is an interesting thing, as well, because we don't have a CEO at the moment, and that CEO selection process is nearing its end. We hopefully should have a CEO in place to start May 1. When we've got that kind of proper liaison point, it will make things an awful lot easier."

An Important Conclusion You Should Consider Carefully
The perpetual funding of the organization presents, in and of itself, wonderful opportunities.

There's also the fact that both the board of directors and the staff are mainly composed of people who come from the IT channel. This makes many conversations much easier and holds the promise of much faster progress. There's a reason the attendees at CCF were all so enthusiastic. It has a great deal to do with the amazing opportunities and with how the leadership is taking shape.

Regular readers of this column know that I have always been an advocate of participating in channel communities because they bring so much value to members. They certainly have over the years for me. I seriously recommend that you visit http://gtia.org to learn how you can join in and enjoy some of that value.

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.

It took very little time for the available gross margin on hardware or software sales to evaporate. The IT reseller channel itself was to blame for its own greatest problem. By discounting heavily as their only competitive strategy, the lowest of the channel made it a race to the bottom. As a result, any software channel representative who told you about the high margins you could get on their software was laughed out of your office. It wasn't even 1990 yet and there were no margins to be achieved on most any computer product.

By the way, this is the reason that most of you first became managed service providers!

Software Developers Become Enablers: The Toolsmith Method
The transition of most channel partners from the reseller model to the MSP model was not lost on software developers. They quickly realized that MSPs would benefit mightily if they could provide them with products around which they could wrap their services, which always generated much higher margins than products ever could.

What they used was actually an older process wherein some software companies sold what they called a "consultant's license," which would allow a service provider to license their software for use on behalf of a specific customer. Servicers purchased another license for each customer they used the software with, but the customer seldom if ever knew anything about the software. They just knew they were enjoying the services consistently.

Enterprising software developers began proactively offering consultant's licenses to more and more of their channel partners who very innovatively created new services and even whole new categories of services that simply called for them to transparently use a vendor's product to provide it. Since they were service sales, not product sales, there was no way customers could "price out" the offering, so the margins remained healthy. I have long referred to this as the "toolsmith" model.

The Early Toolsmiths
The first wave of vendors to embrace this new model were those who made and infrastructure management products such as remote monitoring and management (RMM) platforms, virtual device infrastructure (VDI) and security providers. An MSP could contract to use their software to run those services and enjoy the bonus of having the software developer to support them.

Utility software came next, including migration tools, optimization, high-availability and more defined security tools. Then came the PSA. Professional service automation software shifted to a posture in which it became significantly more critical to MSP businesses who ran their entire business on the platform.

Hardware Vendors Step Up
To show how far down the market this can reach, there's a maker of robot vacuum cleaners that offers a subscription model. Their customer gets a new unit and whatever parts the unit tells home base it needs. Periodically, they take the unit back and provide a brand-new model. The customer isn't buying the hardware; they're just leasing the use of it with an unlimited allowance of parts and consumables.

Why not do the same thing with servers? Why not do the same thing with firewalls? Why not make whole network operations centers (NOCs) and security operations centers (SOCs) available by subscription? Today's vendors go ever further, offering the assistance and support of their professional engineers to help the MSP deliver a broader, more solid set of services.

Today's MSP needs fewer professional personnel and more diverse vendor partnerships to be successful. They can outsource most of the services to toolsmiths, keeping enough of their own people on board to maintain a continuous customer presence, and simply sell and provision the software, hardware and services they obtain from vendor partners. And here you thought vendors wouldn't love you anymore.

The Future of Your Business
So, good news: Hardware and software vendors will be the enablers of your business going forward. They will be heavily incented not just to get you to sell for them, but also to assure that customers enjoy great success using their wares. That is all goodness -- and it's how you should be talking with them from now on.

Also, growing your business will become, at least in part, a function of finding new and innovative technologies to wrap your services around. Don't look now, but that sounds like you're going to have a lot of fun.

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.

As we begin a new year, I thought it would serve to discuss evolution, with a big focus on how we want to evolve and why. From the beginning, we talked about partner specialization. Instead of being generalists, we would focus on determining and pursuing superiority in a specialty. Cloud service providers (CSPs) and Internet service providers (ISPs) were already out there, but how about data service providers, Internet-of-things service providers, storage service providers, messaging service providers, ad infinitum? The list is as long as your imagination.

Fifteen years ago, Microsoft made it clear it wanted all partners to declare their specialty to offer to customers, and plan to partner for whatever else was needed. At that time, partners with as few as a dozen or so employees could hold all of the 30 then-available Gold Certifications if they had four techs who were particularly good at taking tests. Many small partner companies fell into the trap of trying to be all things to all people.

Then Microsoft introduced the "exclusivity rule." Any four techs could only take and pass tests for one Gold Certification and no more. If a partner company wanted to hold all 30 Gold Certifications, they would need to have a tech staff of at least 120 people. It changed the game. Many partners have since seen the wisdom of that strategy and have worked to specialize in any of a number of specific disciplines.

Rising Above the MSP Morass
Since that time, the nature of the channel has changed again. Many "resellers" determined that their future lay in upping their game. They started having their teams take much more advanced training, hired higher-level people and developed formal methodology. They recast themselves as professionals.
Many of those people are now viewed as peers of the lawyers, accountants and other professionals that businesses turn to for critical services; IT is now seen as being every bit as business-critical as law, finance or any other professional service.

Others decided to call themselves MSPs. They had MSP crash-imprinted on their business cards. They turned "MSP" into something that business executives were advised to avoid by CISA, the FBI, the New York Times and others. They muddied the waters for everyone else.

So how are the partners who made the investments supposed to distinguish themselves from these pretenders? Some work to do it by stepping up the quality of their marketing. Others remain focused on promoting themselves through their personal networks. Many are banding together to figure that out.

The Channel Community
I'm a big advocate of channel communities and what they bring to each of us.

Decades ago, I joined the cleverly named Association of Better Computer Dealers (ABCD). Many of us did. We encountered great advice, best practices and many vendors clamoring for our attention. Later, that organization was renamed The Computer Technology Industry Association (CompTIA). I've written recently in this column about that association and I'm now bringing it up again because there have been huge changes -- and each of you needs to figure out how much, if anything, you want from this new organization, and how much you want to participate.

The training and certifications parts of CompTIA and the brand have been sold to Thoma Bravo, which in return created an endowment for the remaining group that serves the channel. That group has now renamed itself the Global Technology Industry Association (GTIA).

The beginning of anything is a great time to become involved with it, if you feel it's worth your while. Right now, GTIA has its member board of directors and several executives in place. They are seeking a new CEO. Imagine having an association that never has to do any fundraising and how free it would be to really benefit its members. That is what GTIA is.

As of this writing, I haven’t seen any information about how GTIA will be restructured, or if that is even being discussed. If it were to default to something resembling what that side of the organization looked like previously, that would be an unfortunate waste of an opportunity. So if you've ever thought about joining any of the many organizations supporting the channel community, now is a great time to consider GTIA and bring your voice to the direction of our community.

Now Is the Time
GTIA includes the word "industry" in its name and has said it is a "trade" association. I beg to differ. A trade association promotes the sale and purchase of products; an industry manufactures them. To properly support our community, GTIA needs to be a professional association promoting and supporting professional practices, conduct, ethics and more among our colleagues.

That's as much as I will contribute to conversation at this point, but it would be great to hear from you. What would you want from this association? How would you like to see it directed? What are you willing to bring to it? What do you want it to bring to you?

My strongest suggestion is that you get connected to GTIA now, at the start. Raise your voice in support of yourself, your business and your colleagues.

If you'd like to discuss further with me, please email me at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you.

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."

To which I asked, "How many of them are lying?"

It wasn't an idle question. I think many of you will agree that there are many former resellers now calling themselves "MSP" without doing anything to transform their business. In fact, they may currently represent the majority of companies calling themselves "MSP." This gives rise to federal agencies and major news outlets warning people to steer clear of anyone calling themselves an "MSP." Not good.

All Heck Breaks Loose
Several years ago, I privately commented to a friend that CompTIA's training and certification business was so successful that it would have to be sold off as a for-profit entity someday.

I didn't foresee that last month's sale of CompTIA's brand and services to Thoma Bravo would result in the creation of an enormous endowment that would fund the operation of the member association side of the organization basically forever. That could be a great outcome, or it could not.

Nor did I foresee that such a sale would raise such a furor. I suspect the ruckus was driven by the quality of the initial announcements, which left plenty of room for speculation and imagination.

What's Next?
There have already been several articles asking who should be the next leader of the new (as yet not renamed) association formerly known as CompTIA. I won't wander into that fray, but I do have some thoughts on what is needed more than who.

First, shedding CompTIA is a good thing for a premier channel association. Our channel is not simply about "computers" anymore and we are quickly morphing from being an "industry" to being a profession -- at least, those who really invested in truly becoming MSPs are. The renamed resellers are just squalling.

In his explanation of the announcement, Shoer pointed out that what is left will be the "trade association" of the computer industry. This is where we diverge. The truly professional service providers I know in this industry are not concerned with "trade." They're concerned with providing excellent services in return for a reasonable fee. What is left of the association formerly known as CompTIA still seems fixated on the products that our professionals integrate into the solutions they provide to customers.

It's like saying that the medical industry consists of doctors who sell pharmaceuticals and prosthetics. They certainly use those items in their practices, but they're not the point. The services are.

Right now, MSP "organizations" are springing up like weeds all over social media, and the fact that our community members are banding together bodes well for everyone. But armed with this wonderful endowment, what was CompTIA should now become the premier professional association for IT practitioners who want to partner together on projects, learn from each other, and grow a powerful profession from our channel.

The new leader of that organization should be someone who knows IT services, perhaps someone who has already built one or more IT service practices successfully in the past. Someone who appreciates the challenges MSPs face, having faced them him or herself.

For my part, I hope it is someone who truly understands and appreciates the sacred heart of partnering. The best success strategy for IT service providers going forward will be to specialize, to focus on one thing they do really well and partner for the rest. We've seen it work in medicine. It will work for our profession, as well.

Witness the Success of Women in Tech
For insight into where the association formerly known as CompTIA should go, we need only to look at the dozens of large organizations that serve the needs of women in technology. Some have tens of thousands of members. Even the smaller ones enjoy the love and loyalty of their members for the value they convey.

I have spent considerable time and effort encouraging the leaders of many of the Women in Technology groups to band together to increase their overall membership numbers so they can speak with an even louder voice. I must report that I have been, so far, quite unsuccessful. My impression, though there is no testosterone involved, is that leadership competitiveness in young organizations has prevented that amalgamation from occurring as yet. I strongly believe that ultimately it will.

Whoever is leading the charge to identify new leadership and create new structure for the newly independent organization should consult with these brilliant leaders and involve them in the selection process. Our profession needs as much leadership as it can find to take it through the intensive growth motions we must perform, like increased education, accreditation, professional licensing and more.

It could end up that the acquisition endowed more than just a fund. It could endow a thriving new profession.

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.

Several years ago, the demand for data and network security services became undeniably clear. Soon, some MSPs began to refer to themselves as MSSPs, managed security service providers. Industry publications seized upon this and began delivering publications specifically devoted to MSSPs.

As with so many things in the channel, MSSP became the latest rage. Everybody wanted to become an MSSP. Well, not everyone. There were many MSPs who had long ago specialized on what they did best, and were uninterested in distracting themselves from that.

Some providers of security products observed this and offered a better solution: Encouraging their MSP partners to partner more enthusiastically with MSSPs who had proven their expertise in the security space. This is great advice. While it seems attractive to "go with the flow" and dive headlong into the security space, it may not fit your existing business model. It may distract you from the investments you need to make to grow your business. On the other hand, a well-evaluated, trustworthy partner can deliver services while you enjoy a slightly diminished profit margin that's offset by the absence of additional costs.

This same logic can be applied to any technology service you don't provide. There are recognized channel experts in storage, servers, datacenter management, ERP and other major software, and any other discipline you can think of. Joining the many associations that serve our community may help you find excellent partners. Also, many consultants are presenting themselves as "partnering experts" or coaches. Check them out.

The New Vendor-Partner Challenge
If you're reading this column, you are likely a partner that has bet the ranch on Microsoft. With other vendors, though, certainty has become elusive.

In the past, you partnered with a vendor because you were confident you could sell a large quantity of their products. You took their training, earned their certifications, and if indeed you did sell large quantities, they showered attention upon you.

As margins evaporated due to competitive discounting, you shifted toward dependence on your own services to generate your profits. In some cases, you outsourced product procurement, preferring to not extend credit to customers or encumber credit from suppliers, and you realized that any slight profit that might remain would be consumed by operating and logistic costs. As your volume of sales disappeared, so did many of your vendor reps who now needed to focus on those few resellers who were still actively and proactively pushing their products out to customers.

Today, when you look at a potential vendor-partner, you no longer look to them to produce any margin for you. That's become a fantasy. So, what do you look for?

Look for vendor-partners who recognize the value you bring in pulling sales of their products through with the projects and programs customers engage you for. This is not new. Way back, many vendors paid "influencer rewards" to the partner who actually sold the project, even if the customer bought the product elsewhere. Now, their buying elsewhere is a given, so you want vendor-partners who recognize and appreciate you as the driver of projects that pull through their products.

Hint: I sold my first Microsoft product in 1981. They have always focused on partners whose services and expertise pull sales through. That's one of the reasons you partner with them so enthusiastically. There are others.

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