Why MSPs Are Entering the AI Era Now | Juan Fernandez

Juan Fernandez shares how AI and evolving MSP models are reshaping the future of managed services. He explains why new entrants, changing value equations, and business-focused tools are driving the next wave of growth.

Key Insights:

• MSPs are shifting from monitoring and maintenance to business operations as a service
  
  
• AI is redefining value by enabling better decision-making and operational efficiency
  
  
• A new wave of MSP entrants is fueling unexpected growth across global markets
  
  

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Top Tack with Rob Scott.

SPEAKER_02 0:07

My friend Juan Fernandez, welcome to the show. Hey, it's great to be here, Rob. Man, you know, Juan, you have been a fixture in the IT managed services industry forever. And it's always a great pleasure to see you. Every time you talk to people, I always try to listen. You're always mentoring people, and you have this way of being so welcoming to everybody. Lots of smiles and hugs. So it's good to see you, but I understand you've been traveling quite a bit.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Yeah, yeah, we've been all over the place. It's been crazy, right? So here we are in you know in Florida, but just uh before this was out in Dallas. Uh before that, we were out in Berlin. Uh we've been bouncing around. We actually were at the ASCII Cup recently, which was an amazing event. You know, shout out to ASCII for an amazing cup event. But yeah, it's just been crazy busy, man.

SPEAKER_02 0:57

So you were at PAX 8 and Ward out there in Berlin. Yeah. Tell us more about that.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We definitely made some big announcements there about you know Super Ops and some of the things that we're doing with PAX 8, obviously, not only here in the US, but also there in Berlin and also in the UK and across the pond, which has been amazing to really see the growth of the managed services industry in those markets. And it's actually kind of eye-opening, you know, to win an award in such a place that you feel like, you know, maybe it's been around for a while. We think in the US, we've seen managed services here for so many years, and you go there and then you see like the impact that you can make in it in an industry that you think here in the U.S. has been around for a while. So it is an honor to be able to make the announcements and be the RMM PSA of choice for PAXAid and its customers, but then also winning, you know, the uh uh achievement awards as well. So for operational excellence, we won a big one at uh Beyond in Denver. And so it's just been really cool to be a part of this journey and to be able to help the industry move forward, man. It's just an honor.

SPEAKER_02 2:02

It's really cool, folks. So for those who are in the audience that don't fully know about SuperOps, tell them just at a high level what does SuperOps do and then how does it help your customers?

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Yeah, yeah, I think the biggest thing I think, you know, when we think about managed services, you look at the MSP, right? You think about where we came from. We were SP service providers to begin with. When we slapped the M on our chest, we became managed, and the way it became managed was with the use of tools, right? The remote monitoring, management, proactive tools that we use today. And so our RMM PSA was an essential piece of that M. And so we're redefining the M, which is the managed part of MSP. And in that, you know, SuperOps is a fully all-inclusive tool that has RMM, PSA, documentation, project management, contracting, billing, and all of the nuances wrapped together with artificial intelligence, feeding back. So it's a little bit different than the RMM PSA of the past, which was problem operation. It's now focusing more on business operation as a service and looking at how to use data to actually activate your business and move you into the future versus just activating the problem and solving it. So it's definitely different, but uh we get uh a fun opportunity to redefine the future and work with great people like you.

SPEAKER_02 3:13

That's awesome. You know, Juan is one of my buddies that lives in Dallas, but that I have to travel all around the world to see. So it's literally we've never literally hooked up in Dallas ever. We live like super close. So um it's always good to see you on the road. I know SuperOps is is very active in the community. Yeah. Um as we as we start to wind down 2024 and start to look forward to 2025. First, what's your impression of the market? Are we do we have tailwinds? Do we have headwinds? What are you expecting from the market for managed services next year? We'll start with that question and then we'll talk specifically about your roadmap.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

Yeah, I think for what we see and right now, which is interesting, I just mentioned we came back from Berlin, and and one of the interesting things that I see is again being in RMMPSA and having the these new metrics, right? We talk about the fastest route to market, the fastest route to profitability. The tools that we've created actually show that there are signs of tailwind, right? Where we're actually catching a lot of speed because of MSPs that are now stepping into this space that were in the bar and then the reseller market space, and they're actually starting to now say, you know what, now's the time I think I'm gonna get in, right? Because it's been around long enough. I have a large enough customer base, and I'm interested in now getting into this space, which is actually kind of ironic to think that you could see this new emergence of MSPs coming to life. I taught a class uh about uh six months ago, and when I started it, I walked into the room and there was about four people. And I thought, okay, this is about what I think the managed services knew in comers would look like. I walked out, went to the restroom, I came back, the room was packed. There was over 200 people in this room, and this was about how to start an MSP today. And I actually asked each and every one of you how many of you are MSPs? Three of them raised their hand. I said, What do the rest of you do? And they all said, We're starting off. And I said, That's a really interesting point. So when you think about where we're at, if we stand here and we talk to the people of the ecosystem, we would all say there's probably, you know, a little bit of resistance, there's not a lot of growth. But then if you step back just a little further, you actually see there's all these new people standing on the outside edge of this crowd learning and and listening and watching. And so this is why I do what I do and try to welcome people to the community because sometimes you got to go get them and bring them in. And this is where I think I see a lot of hope for the future in the next year, is that I think we're gonna see the managed industry uh segment of business grow exponentially. I think we're gonna see new emergence coming in to actually ITSM and ITOM products that are actually been used in the managed services space for a long time that are now being used by uh IT departments, and that's where I really feel like uh the puck is going. And again, you know, talking with a lot of the analysts and looking at some of their data on the reports, you can see there's still significant growth in this space, and I'm happy about it.

SPEAKER_02 6:09

Those of you who listen to the show regularly know that I believe that we're emerging uh from the cybersecurity age of managed services and into the AI age. Yep. Tell us about how SuperOps is is thinking about AI as you move forward and and what's your impression of of where we are with AI and its impact on our industry.

SPEAKER_01 6:31

Yeah, I think that there's a lot of it. I talk a lot about the new value equations and how our MSP is positioning themselves for the future, right? And so when you start to think about how am I generating value, what is my new value equation? It's not gonna be about monetary, maintenance, and management, it's not gonna be about those things, it's gonna be about business operations as a service, it's gonna be about, you know, uh ROI aspects of how I'm actually helping generate revenue for my customers, and what are the solutions to the problems of the modern customer, right? And that's where I think we're starting to see a number of different approaches, which I'm that's for me as a builder, I get super excited about because I'm like, oh man, that's a really good idea. Like, I I love the the fact that everyone's just kind of getting back into this startup vibe of recreating and like starting to retool and design new things, but that also comes with its challenges because to your point, although cybersecurity is here and data is here, there's a lot of now spreading nuance of cybersecurity requirements and legal requirements. And so I always say, no matter what you do, make sure you're protected in the thing that you're gonna do next. And I think that that's why, you know, a good relationship with you guys, like the one we are actually building as a partnership, means a lot because the one thing you want to be careful of is no matter what you do and how you tool and how you bill, is make sure you're covered, right? And that's where I know you've done a great job. And again, kudos to you and Manjar for all the things that you guys do because that's important.

SPEAKER_02 7:53

Well, thank you so much. We, you know, we we feel like that a large percentage of the managed services industry has been underserved by legal, that um in many ways there's an affordability challenge with smaller MSPs, and I've been working very hard to drive the cost down and still make sure that the fundamental legal protections uh that our platform offers are still available even to the small guys. And so because those small guys become big guys, and because small guys get sued too, yeah, they're the ones that get hard to pay, right? So that's it. So, all right, so let's talk about the roadmap for 2025. You know, you've got this big platform, an ambitious platform. Yep, it's uh, you know, uh does a lot of things, and so what what will be added as we go into next year, and what are the things that is on the roadmap for for super ops?

SPEAKER_01 8:50

It's an interesting time for us. You know, we were actually just talking through it as a leadership, and you know, one of the challenges that we have is that we're growing so fast, and we have so many wonderful people like yourself and other partners that are now participating in this growth mode that we're in, uh, that we're actually running out of of space and uh inventory to make announcements, which is actually kind of a weird place to be, to be like, we can't even announce anything else because there's saturation and running announcements every week because of the innovation, because of the launches, because of those uh integration pieces. So as far as what's next for us, obviously today, which is amazing. So by the time this thing runs, this will already be out. We're launching uh RAI, which is Monica, and we're officially giving her a name. She's now going to be uh your uh journey mate inside of our platform, which is an awesome opportunity to be able to have a coach to help you think about your business differently. So we are uh Monica's coming out, which is one of our big announcements. Press release actually uh embargo is lifted this morning, so we're really pumped about that. And again, we have so many new wonderful integrations that just came out. We just partner with you know people like Flex Points, and we've just launched our announcement with ESET, and we have like up tons of other new ones, like we got uh uh alternative payments that just came out. You got you guys are at some point, you guys are in coming through the gates. So yeah, so there's just a number of uh wonderful analysis, whether it be integrations, innovations, whether it be the launch of our AI, and one of the big things we talked about at PAX 8 was also Vision X, the ability for an MSP to forecast their future uh in a managed services arena. It's never existed. And so this is how we think we see AI. We see MSP of the future and how we're empowering our partners and building those strategies around making sure that our customers are being successful and stable and protected in the future. So there's a lot coming. Uh every single week we'll have an announcement from now until the end of December. So uh really, really excited anytime soon.

SPEAKER_02 10:53

I would say that uh Monica sounds cool. You know, we have uh uh AI uh tool that I developed called Lobby. Nice, and I think maybe one day lobby will be yeah, lobby and monica. They'd be friends. That would be cool and uh look forward to that. Um Juan Fernandez from SuperOps.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

Thank you for being on Twitter. Always a pleasure, and thanks you guys. See you out there. See you soon. Alrighty, take care.

SPEAKER_00 11:20

You've been listening to Top Tech with Rob Scott brought to you by Monger. Monger is the first mover in providing contracts as a service solution specifically designed for IT manager service providers. Their SaaS-enabled legal solution is based on industry leading templates customized for each client and periodically updated to ensure that MSPs always have the latest protections and are legally compliant. For more information, visit monitor.com. That's M L N J U R