'MSPs will be more highly valued coming out of this': Complete IT's MD

Microsoft Gold datacentre partner Complete IT has suggested that end users are likely to be more receptive to invest in new technologies and services in the long-term, because of the experience of working through the coronavirus pandemic.

MD Colin Blumenthal (pictured) has pointed to how much some customers have had to change their IT in a short space of time.

"We had a number of our clients who hadn't taken our advice and were in a situation where they needed to make quick, radical changes to their infrastructure to be able to work from home," he said.

"And in general, and we can take a long term view on this, I think that MSPs will be more highly valued by their clients than perhaps they were going into this. Because not having good IT and the ability to work over a distributed working environment meant that for most of our clients, their businesses couldn't operate at all without changes.

"So the upside of this is when we come out of it, there are potentially bigger opportunities in terms of providing our service and products and technologies to our clients. And that's because perhaps clients will be more receptive and willing to invest in technology to ensure that they're covered for any future such eventualities."

Blumenthal said that the rapid spike in customers needing quick changes did lead to a lot of pressure on the UK MSP's own service desk.

"We saw towards the end of March, an increase in both project work and transactional hardware and software sales so we could reconfigure some of our clients to be able to implement a work from home type scenario.

"Equally our help desks saw a dramatic increase in calls made to them and it did place them under some pressure."

However, currently, the UK partner is not seeking financial help or additional rebates from its vendors including WatchGuard, Microsoft and Datto.

Yet Blumenthal conceded that that may change if the crisis does linger.

"We would then approach our key vendors for support. And we would expect them to treat us in the way that we are treating our clients now, so really on a case-by-case basis," he said.

Complete IT is headquartered in London and has a headcount of around 180 staff.

In its FY2019 it logged revenues of a little over £20m (€22.90m).

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Solution Provider
• Colin Blumenthal
• Microsoft
• Blumenthal
• MSP
• CPI Awards