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ScalePad’s Data Driven Vision
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ScalePad’s Data Driven Vision
One of my favorite moments from this year’s IT Nation Connect was my freewheeling discussion with Dan Wensley, a true MSP veteran and leader of Scalepad. He’s also my former boss, and at one point, I was one of his clients.
Since then, he’s been hard at work ramping things up over at Scalepad, which has been acquiring companies in rapid succession. I’ve been keeping my eye on what I predict is their new style of MSP platform, so needless to say, we had a lot to talk about.
I shared our live discussion over on a bonus episode of the Business of Tech, but keep reading for a run-through of my biggest takeaways.
The Vision for Scalepad
When Wensley and I worked together, we had the same vision of the value and relationship between the vendor, the product, the partner, the MSP’s evolution, and, most importantly, the end-user client.
Those foundational operational elements have been in place for 20 years now, but after watching acquisition after acquisition, it’s clear that ScalePad is evolving in a new direction. I asked him to outline his long-term goal, and he explained that ScalePad is continuing the theme of strengthening the client relationship, but they’ve been eyeing opportunities to expand the value proposition to the end user even further – via the MSP.
As for the type of investments they’re looking for to further that goal, they’re looking for both internal and external value to the client. As appealing as it is to focus on international tech operations, utilization rates, service levels, etc, they don’t want to lose touch with the customer.
So they’re on the hunt for ways to help MSPs get to know their business better than ever, then extend that value to the end customer to help them extract even more value, too.
So what exactly does ScalePad value? Right now, the company has six SAS products, three services, and a community that is being developed by Luis Torello, another mutual friend.
Across everything, Wensley and his team operate around four key themes: automating manual tasks, getting more out of automation, standardization of service delivery, and perhaps most importantly, increasing profitability, increasing operational efficiency, increasing maturity, increasing satisfaction of your employees, increasing satisfaction of your customers.
The AI Factor
It’s hard not to hear those values and think about AI. I asked Wensley where his head is at on the AI front, and he shared this succinct summary:
“AI is, as with all disruptive technologies or emerging technologies, it is disruptive and counterproductive in the early days. So the first thing we don’t want to do is allow the theme or the hype cycle around AI to cloud the value we’re delivering to customers.”
Hard to argue with that logic. However, Wensley and his team very much see the potential value in doing AI the right way. To find the best path forward…
“We’re investing a lot in AI, but we’re doing it in an incubator and allowing AI to be, then allow that benefit of our AI development to be taken advantage of by the product managers of all the products that we offer,” he said.
Regular readers know that one of the big things that I’ve been talking about a lot is the idea of AI frameworks (ones are rolling out in the US, EU, and Canada) and how to apply them. I asked Wensley what his thoughts are on using those frameworks at scale, and he agrees that they’re vitally important.
“The conversation that is happening around AI globally, as you mentioned, is an important one… So one of the initial framework decisions we made as an organization was let’s incubate AI. Let’s incubate it as its own development team for all of our SAS products to take advantage of AI without sidetracking nine different development organizations. The first thing we want to do is sort of standardize the group, the thought process, and how we’re going to do it. So at least we know that as a platform, we’re going to be applying it in a consistent way across all of our applications.”
Looking Forward
Back in the day when Wensley and I first started working together, there was an original vision of how to manage everything, touch everything, and work with everything. There’s an argument that we could make that we’ve achieved that vision, so I wanted to know what new growth areas Wensley is thinking about 2-5 years out.
He agreed that after turning our industry from break-fix to remote to recurring revenue models to new service delivery models…
“We’re now kind of down to that commoditization, to your point. Hit sort of a glass ceiling around managed services. What is the new? And I think to our earlier conversation, this is where we have to get even better in showing value to the customer.”
Whether it’s customer portals, customers owning validation, or whatever comes next, Wensley is focusing on “the ability to know how you’re doing and giving them their own measurement for the MSP provider. I think that’s vitally important. I think we have a long runway ahead of us in that area.”
Another forward-looking moment in our chat was about the attitude and age of new MSP founders. He compared their current journey with AI to ours back in the day when we had to drag customers through our experimental transitions from break-fix to managed services.
“Good news for those who are legacy – this doesn’t mean they get left behind. It means they actually get pulled along with that and are shown and maybe enticed to move a little faster where maybe that wouldn’t be in their DNA,” he said.
Potential Pitfalls
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Wensley what market factors keep him up at night. He shared that his biggest concern is how tech-savvy end users are becoming. Will that savvy diminish our value? The counterpoint he also flagged is that technology evolves too fast for even the tech-savvy to keep up.
Along these lines, I wanted to know Wensley’s take on the squeeze I’m noticing in the middle band of MSPs – those that sit somewhere between the PE-back high-performers at the top, and the smaller guys at the bottom.
I feel that this middle band may be stagnating or shrinking, but as far as Wensley sees, he still thinks there’s a lot of vibrancy in that middle layer. Even if they are getting big enough to reach that higher bracket, Wensley sees it as the natural outcome of the market.
That’s it for this week’s newsletter. I hope you enjoyed my time with Wensley as much as I did. As always, I’m available at [email protected]
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