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Is your business ready for 2026?

Welcome back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Podcast.

Join industry leaders Vince Menzione, Scott Sacket, Per Werngren, and Nabil Aitonumeziane as they discuss the evolution of MSPs, the critical role of AI readiness, the power of strategic partnerships within the Microsoft ecosystem, and the growing importance of co-selling and digital marketplaces. Learn actionable strategies for profitability, navigating new buying behaviors, and becoming an “ultimate MSP” by focusing on outcomes, building trust, and embracing community.

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Key Takeaways

• The MSP landscape is undergoing “tectonic shifts” driven by cloud adoption, AI integration, and evolving customer buying behaviors through marketplaces.


• Successful MSPs must evolve beyond the “break-fix” model to become strategic partners, focusing on business outcomes rather than just technology.


• AI presents significant opportunities for MSPs, but requires immediate adoption and internal training to avoid being left behind.


• Strategic partnerships, particularly within the Microsoft ecosystem, are crucial for MSP growth, emphasizing mutual value and trust.


• Standardizing offerings and specializing in specific technologies or solutions can significantly improve MSP profitability and success.


• Engaging with communities and peer groups like Ultimate Partner provides invaluable networking, learning, and collaboration opportunities for MSPs.

If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins.

Key Tags:

MSP,Managed Services,AI,Artificial Intelligence,Microsoft ecosystem,cloud transformation,hyperscalers,marketplace,co-selling,partner strategy,Nabil Aitonumeziane,Scott Sacket,Per Werngren,Vince Menzione,AppPoint,FSI strategy,Ultimate Partner,channel growth,digital buying,data security,governance,copilot,agentic AI,recurring revenue,business model,profitability,trusted advisors,community building,IT business,technology evolution,strategic partnerships

Transcript:

[00:00:00 ] Vince Menzione: We believe this time is like no other. We, we refer to these as the tectonic shifts,

[00:00:08 ] Intro: all the hyperscalers in the world, if you add them all together. Managed services will be one and a half times larger because it is the customer buying behavior that has created the need for all of us to rethink our models.

Until we have data quality, the effectiveness of AI cannot be realized and effectiveness of the partnerships cannot be realized. Can you figure out, first, what your purpose is and how Microsoft can support your purpose and how you can support Microsoft purpose? Now we have a partnership. It’s the ultimate partnership.

[00:00:42 ] Vince Menzione: Good morning. I’m Vince Manzione, the CEO of Ultimate partner, and the host of the Ultimate Guide to Partnering Podcast. And I’m thrilled to be back in the studio here in Boca Raton. We have a lot of stories about Boca Raton. It is really the seminal point in the start of this ecosystem we all care about.

It’s also where we host the Ultimate Eye to Partnering podcast where we host our events, and we’re gonna do our very first live stream here today. Uh, it’s designed for you to achieve incredible success as a partner. We’re working with hyperscalers like Microsoft. Our topic today is becoming the ultimate MSP.

This is a topic that we care deeply about as, as our guests do as well. And each of my guests that are here today, I am so privileged to have members of our community, friends, uh, people that I truly appreciate and admire who are here now, who feel the same and are so passionate on this subject. I wanna invite them each to say, introduce themselves and say a couple words about why they believe this MSP moment is so unique and why it’s so relevant to all of us today.

So s Scott, good to see you.

[00:01:49 ] Scott Sacket: Great to see you. So exciting to be here alive, right? Gotta be careful. So for those who have, I’ve not met yet. My name is Scott Sackett and I’m the senior Vice President of Partner Strategy at AAV Point. And, um, I’ve been in the channel ecosystem now for over 25 years. I was a partner, of course, I’ve been at AAV point, leading channel now for many years, um, almost 20 years.

And, um, this moment’s incredible, right? Um, you know, cloud really democratized what, what partners could do. And how to build up, um, and, and support many customers, small and large. And, and today, MSPs really are, um, the linchpin to how we build and, and, uh, manage it. So it’s an incredible moment for them and, and it’s only getting, uh, more important as things change and grow and evolve.

So exciting times.

[00:02:36 ] Vince Menzione: I love the linchpin comment ’cause it really holds it all together. I love that. And p Wgre, another great friend of ours, p uh, please take a moment and introduce yourself to our audience or all of our friends that are watching

[00:02:47 ] Per Werngren: us today on the line. Yes, thank you, Ian. It is a privilege to be here.

So I’m the CEO of Idex. We do AI and Azure operations. And why do I love MSPs? Well, I’ve been doing subscriptions all my life, and recurring revenue is such a beautiful thing because you start small, you sell a little bit. You sell more and you don’t lose what you have sold. You just keep on building and it all piles up.

Beautiful business model.

[00:03:16 ] Vince Menzione: I love it. I love it.

[00:03:19 ] Nabil Aitonumeziane: Right. Hi, great to see

[00:03:20 ] Vince Menzione: you, my friend.

[00:03:21 ] Nabil Aitonumeziane: Thanks for having me. I mean, it’s been, uh, amazing coming to Florida. To the Hot Florida. But, uh, I’m Nabil Ian. I’m the president of FSI strategy. We’re an MSP. Uh, we specialize in Microsoft. We’re a, uh, managed service provider, but, uh, we specialize a hundred percent in Microsoft, uh, technologies.

So thanks for having Well,

[00:03:41 ] Vince Menzione: and you are an MSP, right? Yes. We talk about this all the time and how you’ve evolved your company. You a case study. We are, but

[00:03:48 ] Nabil Aitonumeziane: we are not Your traditional MSP, which is. Managed service provider. We are more of the modernization solution partner ’cause we are trying to, uh, live in the AI era.

Yeah. World. So we had to change our name as well. How to help our customers, uh, move forward with this technology is moving very fast. So

[00:04:10 ] Vince Menzione: I’m gonna frame that and we’ll go right into, I’m gonna, I have, I’m gonna hit you with the first question, but you know, we talk about this tectonic shifts. That we’ve seen in our world, in our lives, and we’ve been talking about transformation and ultimate partner for many years.

It started back in my Microsoft days, 10 years leading the partner business for public sector and growing that organization during the clouds transformation. But we’ve been talking about a, a, the hyperscalers really at the center and really the, we talk about Boca, the fact that Bill Gates came down here in 1981 and signed an agreement with IBM really sparked this ecosystem.

There’s over a half a million just in the Microsoft ecosystem of partners. Probably well over a million if you put Google Cloud and AWS and, and you look at that center of the universe and we’ll talk about that center and how there are now seven seats at the table. But then, you know, we talked about the last couple years, AI really became a thing.

Chat, GBT started it all back in November, 2022. And now, you know, we’ve had this incredible transformation that we’re gonna talk about, why it’s so fundamental today. And why it’s even more important, and then also how marketplaces are so fundamental to success today that the buying behaviors have changed.

The millennials, the new buying persona, and they buy from, they’re very comfortable in marketplaces. We’re all more comfortable now hitting our phone three times and having a box show up at the end of the day, right? We’re all used to digital buying and it’s becoming the buy. The buying process has changed dramatically.

And the hyperscalers have all embraced this marketplace. But then what do you need? Fundamentally, in order to have success, you need to have engagements with those sellers. And that’s why co-selling is so critical and important. We’re gonna talk about that as also an important component. And then the hype.

We talk about this ecosystem and why you can’t go alone. And then we, we’ve been around ultimate partner. We created ultimate partner. ’cause we recognize that