MSP Automation was the main focus of our recent webinar, which covered how Managed Service Providers can transform the scalability of their businesses by removing the headaches of manual request processing. The webinar was widely attended by enterprise IT staff too, particularly those with an ethos of delivering an experience (rather than a service level). The same principles apply, so here’s an overview of what was covered during the session:

The Path to Scalability

In order to grow, MSPs must win new customers, but each new customer brings more devices and users to manage, incident tickets to resolve and provision requests to deal with.
The belief is that an MSP needs staff to manage these customers, requests, tickets and devices – but is this actually the case?

The focuses for MSP business owners or IT leaders are:

• Have I got enough staff to meet the existing customer demand?
• What capacity do I have in my existing staff to take on new customers?

Which leads to balancing:

• Hiring new staff now, prior to winning new business, before capacity becomes too tight
• Risk delivering lesser service to existing clients whilst taking on new customers until there is more time to recruit and train a new hire

Below is an example chart of MSP growth vs cost challenge, with typical growth Kelverion have seen, where staff hiring lags and leaps costs, as capacity is increased to allow business growth; this has negative impacts on margin and profit:

The approach to the tasks performed by MSPs (or internal IT teams) is the cause of the above profile.

The Work of Today’s Managed Service Providers

Take a moment to consider some of the work completed by Managed Service Providers today:

• A phone call is received raising a request when a PC stops working
• An automatic notification of issues appears for a member of staff to process
• A ticket is raised for access to a business function needed to do a job role, e.g. Active Directory Groups
• A request for some new software to be installed
• Daily or regular tasks for a shift operations team to undertake, ensuring that everything is running smoothly or identifying the number of times a problem has occurred
• A new starter to a customer generates considerable manual processing for user set-up and access provisions

And these are just a few examples of some of the mundane laborious work that is being completed manually.

This isn’t unique to MSPs either; they’re the same challenges enterprise IT departments face with internal customers. However, for an MSP, the volume increases exponentially because these tasks are repeated for numerous customers simultaneously and typically with much stricter SLAs in place for delivery.

Complete this laborious and mundane work with MSP Automation

What is MSP Automation?

Most automation approaches start in the same place; coding. For years, IT engineers have relied on scripts or a series of scripts to perform tasks and link them together to provide an ‘automation’.

The main challenge with scripts or coding is that a developer is needed to write in code and then also be available to troubleshoot and support the code.

In scripts, this tends to be even more challenging as, in our experience, we’ve found this code can be poorly documented and written by a single individual, so the “automation” doesn’t scale. This is problem is heightened further if that individual is unavailable or no longer with the organization, especially when no one else has the coding skills to support or modify them.

Successful MSP Automation

The solution is no code, low code automation, which enables non-developers to build and support automation rapidly, flexibly and at scale, providing the following capabilities:

• Drag and drop user interface to map processes
• Library of integrations with forms-driven objects, without the need to understand a target system’s API to orchestrate those tools, e.g. service desks, identity management and virtualization products
• Vendor-supported integrations (rather than ad-hoc community support or no support at all!)
• Production-ready content to learn from and deploy initial automation use cases rapidly
• A simple use-case capture and analysis tool to identify the high-value use cases for your organization. At Kelverion we refer to this as our Automation Value Calculator.
• Developer functionality providing the option to code, leveraging DevOps best practices

MSP Automation delivers the tools to implement and formalise processes by capturing, modelling, and executing all of these elements into an automated process.

These processes integrate with everything you would expect an MSP to use. This isn’t about replacing existing tooling, MSP Automation is about wrapping what the business currently has with automation to enhance it. Here are some of the elements that a tool should be able to automate:

• Existing service desks
• Enterprise management tools
• Standard email
• Databases
• Monitoring tools
• Logs
• File systems management
• Native operating system functions

The examples above are standard requests that can (and should) be automated across multiple customers. Automation of this volume will be business-changing in freeing up the time of your existing staff. These hours are better invested in onboarding new customers and building new services, not fulfilling mind-numbing repetitive tasks manually.

When MSP Automation is applied, this solves the MSP growth vs cost challenge. Headcount growth and staff costs are comfortably below revenue, enabling profit margins to increase without compromising on service delivery.

The Result of MSP Automation

MSP Automation allows businesses to serve more customers with fewer resources and provide a competitive advantage over other Managed Serviced Providers not using automation due to faster service and experience. The base cost is lower, too, enabling scope for more competitive pricing (without compromising on margins). All whilst offering an improved service to customers.

To find out more about how automation can scale your MSP business, which processes MSPs are looking to automate and how you can deliver this in a multi-tenanted automation approach, watch the full webinar recording.

About Kelverion

Experts in Cloud, On-Premise and Hybrid automation, Kelverion provide solutions and integrations that remove the manual process tying up IT staff; transforming the productivity, efficiency, and supportability of IT service automation. Our products utilize and enhance the power of Microsoft Azure and System Center Orchestrator.

 Working closely alongside Microsoft we have developed our integrations and automation solutions to help bridge the gap between Microsoft’s automation platforms and third-party systems, in the process building key alliance partnerships with multiple vendors to ensure our products are fully certified.

Since 2010, Kelverion has expanded to become a global company, with offices now in the UK,  Canada, and the US. Through this, we are able to offer and support products and professional services engagements to enterprise-level organizations no matter where they are.

For more information, to arrange a discovery call or to see a demonstration please contact our helpful team today via info@kelverion.com.