I’ve been drinking lots of coffee lately (nothing new there) and conversing with IT Managers about their career and what issues they face currently as an IT manager. I’ll be bringing you some of their stories here, as I know it’s helpful for a lot of my community to know what it takes to move into IT management from technical roles.

Plenty of the IT Manager’s are in charge of 50 – 500 seat environments that engage MSP’s for some or all of their support requirements.

Here’s what’s interesting… Some are entirely public cloud environments. No servers on prem and mostly they’re using SAAS based M365 products and hence don’t really fit the traditional MSP model for support.

By that I mean, counting the workstations and servers doesn’t really provide an accurate support package, given lots of BYOD machines and no on-prem servers.

MSP’s seem to either offer a per user/per device /per server sort of pricing model or the larger ones offer more of a body shopping model where they provide a support engineer on-site for a certain number of days per week.

Neither is probably quite right for cloud only IT environments.

Surely there’s some innovative MSP’s that have come up with managed service agreements that suit the 50 – 500 seat clients that are highly leveraging the cloud and M365 and have built support plans around that?

This seems to be more common overseas, than in little ol’ Perth at the moment.

Perhaps an agreement that named products (Sharepoint, Exchange online, Intune) etc combined with the number of users that needed to be supported for that product, would be more appropriate for building a support plan for these companies… just spitballing here..

By the way, see our job portal if you’re looking for IT jobs in Western Australia.