Attending Foundry’s (ARN) Edge 2026 conference last month, we noted a significant shift in the nature of MSP owners and operators: the transition from technology-led enthusiasts to professionally led and run MSPs is well and truly under way. The key indicators are a growing focus on the metrics that matter to customers and their outcomes; benchmarking of service efficiency and profitability; standardisation of operating models, platforms and approaches (broadly, the “operating system for MSPs”); and the key role vendors and partners play in the ecosystem, including a new type of partner adept at helping MSPs deliver lines of revenue or service they have traditionally avoided.
The tooling matters, until it doesn’t
The temptation to reduce tooling conversations to the opportunity-and-threat axis of automation and AI remains high. But a more mature approach to standardising tooling promises to help the industry from two angles: a generation of skilled technicians broadly trained on a small number of dominant, fast-growing platforms; and a customer base more conversant with the tooling, trending towards self-service, which helps both MSP and client close human-induced gaps in understanding, time to resolution and value delivery.
At the same time, customers are generally ambivalent about the back-end systems their MSP uses. When their operating model demands integration with the MSP’s platform, it needs to be low effort, beneficial and free of lock-in. The choice of platform as a differentiator or a reason for a price premium is fast receding. Professionally run MSPs know they must standardise on platforms that support widely adopted operating models, are understood by customers, and govern the security and sovereignty of data transparently. They also need to weigh the value of in-house core systems IP against the heavy technical burden those systems will keep carrying into the future.
Vendor partners and frenemies
In the early days of MSPs, some went out of their way to be ambivalent, agnostic and even borderline hostile to tight vendor relationships, fearing that closeness to a vendor might prejudice their customers’ choice of technology, architecture and platform. Vendors introduced ever more stringent engagement hurdles, which meant MSPs had to choose between them, commit go-to-market, engineering and sales resources, and hope to be a meaningful player in a vendor’s ecosystem. Customers now seem to place less value on a vendor-agnostic MSP than on the clear benefits of alignment with a small, dominant few: more competitive offerings, better integration with the MSP’s and the customer’s operating models, and more portable services that let customers keep a choice of key partners aligned with those vendors.
The vendors that appear to be succeeding are the ones that have in turn invested real resources in making their MSP partners’ businesses better: more professional, better aligned with customer outcomes and, importantly, better able to deliver automation and AI outcomes than in-house MSP teams, given the scale advantages vendors enjoy.
The professional provider to the MSP
One indicator of the industry’s professional transition is the number of providers to MSPs, helping them open up new markets, deliver more value to customers and, importantly, drive more enterprise value through deeper engagement with clients. In the past this would have meant high investment and risk for an MSP. Now the models on offer from this new range of providers are relatively low risk and easy to integrate with existing MSP offerings, and they let MSPs focus on real value uplift across their client base. This should be a preferred strategic option for MSPs, which otherwise risk being disintermediated by narrow but deep professional services firms able to deliver the value clients want.
The AI monster
Nearly every conference session had an AI flavour, but business conversations tend to focus on how AI and automation can push revenue per head higher, without really addressing the higher-value opportunities these technologies present. Today’s conversations are about driving delivery costs down, improving front-line customer service and freeing engineers for higher-value work as AI agents handle the administrivia of running an MSP. What we believe is being left on the table is the way AI and automation can deliver significantly more value to the same client base without adding headcount.
Observability at a scale no team of engineers can stay across, with AI pointing to where resolution can be automated as configuration and repair move to centralised, cloud-based control planes, remains an open opportunity for first-mover MSPs. It will need tighter integration with vendors’ platforms that deliver observability intelligence in an actionable way, and attention and investment to meet sovereignty obligations securely.
Our findings are borne out by the recent techpartner.news MSP Index 2026 report. Among the MSPs surveyed, understanding of the cost-out side of AI and automation is getting clearer. But as we’ve said before, there is only so much cost to take out, down to a nominal amount or close to zero, while the upside in services and outcomes MSPs could deliver, which clients have not yet identified, is potentially huge.
Either way, our view is that the MSP community is well on the way to professionalising, having become far more customer-focused, margin-aware and financially literate in recent years. Recent acquisitions of local players by offshore MSPs operating at scale are one proof point, even as the number of new MSPs starting each year exceeds those folding or being acquired. It will be exciting to see how things play out over the coming years.
This article first appeared on LinkedIn on 18 August 2026.