MSPs: Saving Customers Money From the Frontier to the Wide Open… Models!
MSPs return to their roots, establishing themselves as true integrators of AI solutions.
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Saving customers’ money by reducing their capex and opex costs has always been a hallmark of channel services. The best IT engineers distinguish themselves by talking strategically with customers about how to license or operate IT resources in the most cost-efficient way possible. This is the complete approach to service IT needs from both the technology and business operations perspective.
Since the earliest days of the channel, we’ve been integrators, creating advantage by combining components from various vendors to assemble solutions that are far less expensive than a single-vendor system. It began with swapping out hardware like storage drives and memory from the OEM with third-party units. Cloud had us swapping out the customer’s entire data center for a less-expensive remote datacenter operation.
The MSP as AI Integrator
Today’s primary channel partner, you the MSP, will continue that fine tradition of supplying superior integration services even more powerfully than before now that several things have occurred that come together to create new customer needs.
The first is the reality the frontier large language model (LLM) labs are finally confronting that their economics of running AI is far too high to be supported by the revenue they’re generating. OpenAI is said to be spending $1.35 for every $1 of revenue they earn. That’s called “a losing proposition.”
But experienced MSPs know that nothing remains the vendor’s problem for long, especially when it comes to the cost/price calculation. Their only solution is to pass that excess down to the channel to deal with. They raise their prices, then so must we. That’s called them having control over us. That, my friends, is not good.
In the past, our strategy for escaping those increased costs was to turn to “third-party” components not manufactured or branded by the OEMs.
Now, in 2026, the same is happening with AI.
