Having warmed the academic halls for a long time now, VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) world is now a reality, rather unfortunate at that. The ongoing global pandemic and its far-reaching ramifications have presented a variety of challenges for enterprises all over. These unexpected challenges have forced enterprises to come up with novel solutions that need digital support.
While digital transformation was the buzzword in board rooms so far, the current VUCA scenario has provided a much-needed impetus to the process. This is where Managed Service Providers have stepped in and brought essential digital solutions for legacy and digital-native enterprises alike. While MSPs are also caught up in the same VUCA world as their customers, they need to navigate the circumstances in a manner that enables them to turn their customers’ and their challenges into opportunities.
Volatility
In times when even experts are baffled over setting a timeline for the circumstances to get back to normal, the conditions are definitely volatile for enterprises all over the world, including MSPs. While the market is volatile, MSPs also have an opportunity at hand — the opportunity for growth. The prohibitive conditions induced by global pandemic have forced enterprises to look for novel ways to deliver services. In fact, MSPs have witnessed increased customer demand as enterprises have now realized the importance of digitalization.
MSPs need to capitalize on this trend and deliver cost-effective solutions that bring efficiency, speed, agility, and automation for enterprises. Not just for the current scenario, but even for the future, a vital aspect of capitalizing on this trend is focusing on customer retention. MSPs still have the time to train their workforce, reinvest, and acquire proper tools and technologies. Before the world gets back to normal and MSPs get busy with operations, they need to invest in the right ITSM, monitoring, and cloud management tools as well as strike the right cloud partnerships to ensure future growth.
Uncertainty
The increase in demand also presents another new challenge for MSPs — the flux witnessed in how business is conducted is unprecedented. This flux can be observed in both — traditional enterprises as well as digital-native enterprises. MSPs are faced with a unique challenge of ensuring timely delivery of precise solutions for traditional and digital-native enterprises. This comes with its own set of challenges as both are at opposite ends of the business spectrum and have vastly different needs.
The way forward for MSPs in this uncertain scenario is offering choices. MSPs need to shun one-size-fits-all thinking and adopt a varied, personalized, and decentralized approach toward their customers. They need to look at their customer’s problems from the customer’s perspective and act as a consulting partner when resolving customer issues. The need for the hour for MSPs is to diversify, offer choices to customers, and let customers pick the areas for assistance.
Complexity
The onslaught of COVID-19 has made the situation severely complex for every discipline in the world. Administrations worldwide have done their best to tackle the situation and have been quite successful so far. However, administrations have taken a heterogeneous approach to this, and it has presented regional compliance and regulatory challenges for MSPs. Other than this, as different parts of the world crawl toward normalcy, the way the market is opening also differs widely, presenting a challenge of uniformity for MSPs.
Tackling the complexity brought about by the current scenario demands that MSPs go for regional empowerment. MSPs need to adopt a distributed business strategy in dealing with customers from different parts of the world. Agility will be of paramount importance as MSPs deliver their services in sync with the prevailing regulations in their customer’s market.
Ambiguity
The current state-of-affairs has added ambiguity as another challenge for MSPs. Enterprises are in uncharted waters and need multi-disciplinary competencies to stay relevant in the current scenario. Customers are diversifying and moving into new businesses to face the ambiguous challenges surrounding the market, which presents MSPs with the same ambiguous challenges that their customers face.
In the current scenario, the reselling approach is not going to last for MSPs. They need to add service value for customers and embed tool-based and automated managed services in their portfolio. Overall, MSPs need to build a service around the cloud wherein the automated and managed tools add value for customers. MSPs need to broaden their customer’s horizons in order to help them overcome the ambiguous challenges.
Overview
Navigating the VUCA world involves MSPs discarding the conventional paradigm of merely delivering tangible services. MSPs need to move away from aging price models in the industry and ascertain the value of services delivered to customers. Adopting a niche approach while keeping tabs on the overall market is the way forward. Specialization in niches and building niche teams for targeted delivery of customer solutions is the key mantra for MSPs navigating this VUCA world.