Technology is now central to business strategy, driving growth, productivity, and competitive advantage worldwide.
But something is holding many back: a lack of alignment between their IT and the strategic growth they’re seeking.
The root cause of this is the way IT is set up as an industry, the way it’s sold, and the way it’s implemented within organisations. Aka, the traditional Managed Service Provider (MSP) model.
What is an MSP?
The MSP model emerged during the formation of the modern IT industry in the 1980s and 1990s.
Focused on delivering ongoing support and infrastructure management, an MSP is designed to ensure system operability, security and resolve issues quickly.
Basically, they’re a partner that removes the day-to-day headache of IT management.
MSPs are primarily reactive, ensuring things remain operational rather than proactively driving transformation.
MSP activities include:
- Managing and monitoring networks and servers
- Delivering helpdesk support to staff
- Ensuring software updates and patches are applied
- Handling backups and disaster recovery planning
MSPs, by design, work within a relatively fixed scope.
The MSP market is oversaturated, with companies offering similar tiers or packages of support, leading many to compete on price.
Companies are attracted to the low cost of an MSP’s basic tier, for example, their bronze tier.
When they wish to broaden the scope of their IT, they then need to invest more to access the silver or gold tiers.
But this scope, no matter how much more a company invests, will not expand to include harnessing IT for strategic transformation. Here are three key reasons why.
1.The model’s tier system & fixed scope
The add-ons in higher MSP tiers are designed to extend reactive forms of support.
For example, increasing the number of endpoints covered or speeding up response times.
Each tier upgrade just increases how comprehensive a companies’ IT management is rather than leveraging it to drive change.
2. The model’s reward system
MSPs are structured to deliver predictable, repeatable IT support services within agreed SLAs.
Their business model rewards stability and cost efficiency, not experimentation or strategic change initiatives.
This means everyone within an MSP – from helpdesk staff to senior executives – is incentivised to focus on maintaining your IT rather than identifying how it can be used to drive business growth.
3. The model’s missing consultancy
Strategic IT transformation involves aligning technology to business goals.
Doing this requires consulting expertise, business process re-engineering, and bespoke solutions.
These disciplines are outside the scope of MSP’s standardised service contracts.
To be clear, the MSP model has served and continues to serve the needs of companies well – hence its dominance across the IT industry.
But in an age where technology is so critical to business competitiveness, its scope isn’t designed to provide the business growth that many are seeking. For this, a new model is needed, that of the Technology Success Partner (TSP).
What is a TSP?
A TSP offers a new approach to business IT.
Its model is less about providing set services and focuses more on building a partnership that shapes the future of your business.
Instead of starting your partnership with pricing tiers, a TSP will work to understand your business roadmap and goals before identifying how your IT can be enhanced and tailored to achieve them.
A TSP handles all the managed services an MSP delivers, but places a stronger emphasis on using technology as a driver of growth rather than keeping systems running.
TSP activities include:
- Providing strategic IT consultancy alongside support
- Designs and maintains a multi-year technology roadmap
- Offering bespoke software development to solve unique business challenges
- Designing an IT infrastructure that aligns directly with business goals
- Focuses on prevention, optimisation, and enablement
The key difference between MSPs vs TSPs
What it is critical to understand when looking at the MSP and TSP is that they are entirely different models of approaching IT.
This distinction is key because in every model, success and failure are measured differently.
Success in an MSP is a 20% increase in the speed of helpdesk resolutions. Success is a TSP is the introduction of a bespoke software platform to streamline internal workflows, which has increased business productivity by 20%.
An MSP is invested in meeting set service requirements because that is what you pay them for, and that is what their model is designed to deliver.
A TSP is likewise invested in delivering measurable business outcomes through IT.
Recognising the differences between these two models is why Rio IT now positions itself as a TSP.
Why Rio is a TSP
After recognising that our services, particularly our expertise in software development, are tailored to solve complex business challenges and deliver results that extend beyond the typical MSP scope, we redefined our role.
We operate with the mindset that every IT investment must have a strategic business purpose, suggesting improvements to our clients that are designed to increase efficiency, productivity, security, and revenue.
We don’t just solve IT problems; we create solutions to business problems by leveraging IT more effectively.
And we believe that businesses seeking to compete through technology are better served by the TSP model.
We take a distinctive data-first approach to technology strategy, focusing on unlocking actionable insights that help our clients drive measurable improvements.
You can learn more about this approach by visiting our homepage.