Secrets of MSP Success: What We Learned from Our Most Successful Partners

Earlier this year, Wasabi shared the winners of its annual Partner Awards. These awards recognize outstanding achievement in channel success from around the globe. While sales are part of what makes a winning channel partner, we go out of our way to honor innovative and emerging organizations doing business in the field of cloud object storage.

When we spoke to the winners of the global MSP awards, their revealed their secrets of success with us and their tactics are ones MSPs around the world can learn from. 

Find a market. Capture it.

Success in any field means understanding your market: their problems, their needs, and how and when they make purchases. Synthesize these data points with a winning set of products and services and you’ve got a profitable business on your hands.  

Every industry has its own set of IT challenges for MSPs to meet but compliance requirements are something that every provider should be aware of. These requirements dictate how a business must operate (baseline security practices, data retention rates, etc.) and, in some cases, who they procure from. Organizations in highly regulated or government-funded industries are only allowed to do business with approved vendors who meet certain security or data sovereignty conditions. Capturing the trust of an industry through these compliance standards can be the gateway to prolonged and sustained success.

Netherlands-based MSP Vancis identified this opportunity in their own country. They pursued a framework agreement with SURFnet, the IT cooperative of Dutch education and research institutions, that allows member organizations to purchase services without issuing a tender. Vancis strategically went to market with a Microsoft365 cloud backup service knowing the education sector relies heavily on that product for daily operation.  

By targeting a market and tailoring their services to meet its needs, Vancis gained a massive sales opportunity. Through their SURFnet contract, they became one of the exclusive retailers to a data-hungry and IT-reliant sector, which contributes mightily to their profitability year after year. MSPs should learn this lesson well: knowing how to capture your market will open new doors for your business.  

Reduce your overhead and complexity

By adopting a service notion rooted in a customer-first philosophy, MSPs can turn traditional cost centers into powerful value drivers—enhancing operational efficiency, deepening client satisfaction through solutions that genuinely address customer needs. 

Canadian MSP ESI was navigating this challenge. The firm manages 800 terabytes (TB) of storage hardware where customers send their Veeam backups. When that system inevitably fills up, they tier the oldest data to their cloud provider to make room for the latest backups. Both elements of this system, the data center and the cloud storage tier, were cost centers for ESI. On top of that, the system was cumbersome to manage. Their data center required more supervision and regular maintenance to stay operational and their Cloud storage lacked customization, automation, or account management features necessary for running a multi-tenant storage business.  

Last year, the firm switched their cloud storage destination to Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. Wasabi’s flat-rate storage was below what they were paying and came with a simple pricing structure that cut out fees related to API operations and data egress.

They also utilized Wasabi Account Control Manager, a tool specially designed for MSPs to streamline multi-tenant storage operations like billing and account creation. The program grants ESI system architects a single-pane-of-glass to view and manage storage utilization across accounts. This tool was a game-changer for ESI and was cited as the biggest advantage of the switch to Wasabi. It gave the team a new level of efficiency when managing their cloud storage that was simply not available from their previous provider.

As a result of these changes, ESI increased the value they delivered to their clients on every terabyte sent to the cloud, all while maintaining a strong focus on customer service by ensuring seamless, reliable, efficient and secure data management.  

More importantly, it shows how keeping clients at the heart of every decision amplifies these changes, creating profitable ripple effects that enhance both efficiency and client satisfaction across the organization 

Partnerships in technology and business

As an MSP, your technology partners are also your business partners. How these alliances support your organization should go beyond a service offering—they should bolster your business, too, whether that’s gaining access to a new market, widening your margins, or increasing efficiencies in daily operations.

At Wasabi, we built our storage service with the MSP in mind. We are the only cloud storage provider to offer a multi-tenancy account management tool like Wasabi Account Control Manager, which has revolutionized the way MSPs can sell and manage cloud storage. In conjunction with the Custom Cloud Console for white labeling, Wasabi is a true partner to MSPs in every aspect of the word, from providing best-of-breed cloud storage to a suite of operations and management tools.

One thing that was clear from speaking to our most successful MSPs: it’s not the product that makes them successful, it’s how they use it.