Arnie Bellini from Connectwise likes to shake things up. That’s not a surprising statement to anyone that has met him! He’s one of my favorite people in this industry and has a great sense of humor, so he won’t mind if I bust his chops a bit. I’m sure he’ll take the opportunity to pay me back at the next Connectwise Summit!
Now I’m sure that Arnie stares at his RSS reader all day long just waiting for my next SMBITPros post, so I’m not sure how he missed my post on the importance of the language we use to describe our industry, but it appears that he did.
The point of the post was that as an industry, we need to commit to a common vocabulary for how we describe our industry and what we do. This is important because it then allows our customers to search for us using a common language, and makes marketing to them that much easier.
Well, just when I thought MSP or managed service provider was going to be the clear winner, Arnie Bellini comes along and starts promoting the term TaaS - Technology as a Service.
Now, normally I wouldn’t think it’s such a big deal to have one guy throwing out a new term for our industry, but Arnie Bellini has a little bit of pull in our space, and more than a few people are going to listen to just about everything he says (getting 25%+ net margins in your business gets people to pay attention!).
Come on Arnie, why did you have to go and mix things up like that?!
Actually, I’ve got to admit…I think Arnie is on to something. I mean, what the hell does Managed Service Provider mean anyway? It doesn’t communicate anything to the customer, and I’ve heard just about every type of business from technology services to healthcare call themselves a Managed Service Provider over the last year.
Technology as a Service actually communicates something:
- It’s technology
- Delivered as a service
Pretty straightforward to me. Maybe this is the language our industry should adopt. Did I just admit that Arnie was right? NEVER!!!
MRC
