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The top challenge facing managed service providers (MSPs) today is two-fold—one, the current speed of change in technologies, and two, the growing amount of services required by clients. Both combine to exacerbate the demands on MSPs, and make it necessary for service providers to transform so they can keep up with the modern-day level of play.

What is more, over half (57%) of IT service providers say that they experienced disruptions or outages with their normal software, productivity or collaboration tools as a result of companies shifting to a remote work model in the first half of 2020. 

Undoubtedly, the past year has brought booming times for managed service providers (MSPs), value added resellers (VARs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) across the board. As businesses globally undertake large-scale digital transformations, they’re looking to the channel for an endless array of cloud products and services, and turning to service providers to select and run the right combination of tools. What’s more, it looks like the rising demand for managed services won’t abate anytime soon with the market expected to reach $492.15 billion by 2027. 

Today’s IT managed services industry moves at a breakneck pace. Eighty-two percent of managed service providers (MSPs) already feel the infrastructure they handle gets more complex by the day, and the accelerated digital transformation of business brought on by the pandemic will only exacerbate this sentiment. 

These are times of flux for managed services. With the world largely going remote and heading to the cloud faster than ever in 2020, this upward trend in demand for cloud services continues even as some workers return to the office as many employers adopt permanent work-from-home policies and others adopt a hybrid in-office and work-from-home approach. Seizing this moment of advancing demand for cloud requires a deliberate and targeted strategy from managed service providers (MSPs).

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many managed service providers (MSPs) feared the worst. A 2020 survey from The Channel Company and consultancy IPED showed nearly three out of five service providers and vendors predicting severe decreases in IT budgets. 

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have come a long way from the break-fix model. Far beyond assisting clients on an as-needed basis, today’s rapid digital transformation has seen their role evolve into becoming proactive, far-sighted strategic partners.

Today managed service providers (MSPs) find themselves in something of a pricing fix, jostled by a disorienting array of scope creep, discrepant documentation, inconsistent billing, and contracts that can diverge widely from one customer to the next. The result is a confusing financial blizzard that can leave providers struggling to keep track of profits and cash flow, in turn threatening to put serious pressure on their bottom line.

To our partners who’ve asked for more services and support to transform and accelerate growth, we’ve heard your call.

We are excited to bring you another major release of Harmony. This post includes changes and features that have been added in this version, with links related to each feature for an in depth walk through.

Moving forward we are adopting a quarterly release cycle. This means that all new features are released on a quarterly basis. Once released this version will only have bug fixes applied to it for the next three months, after which it then becomes our stable version that only has priority fixes applied. For example: