Managed service providers (MSPs) are facing growing pressure on all sides. Customers want more, talent is harder to find and cloud environments are becoming increasingly complex — stretching teams and squeezing margins.
For Vadim Vladimirskiy, CEO and founder of Nerdio, this is exactly where MSPs have an opportunity to stand out.
We sat down with Vladimirskiy at NerdioCon in La Quinta, California, to talk about the future of managed services and why operational efficiency is becoming a key competitive advantage.
Nerdio was built to help MSPs run smarter, faster and more profitably in the cloud. Its platform focuses on automation, cost optimisation and simplified management — helping providers deliver better service without sacrificing margins.
In this conversation, Vladimirskiy explains why MSPs are still leaving money on the table, and where cloud-native operations can unlock their next phase of growth.
MSPs today are under pressure to do more with less. How is Nerdio positioning itself as a solution for MSPs navigating economic uncertainty and margin pressures?
A great question, and, certainly, in the last few days, there’s been an increase in that economic uncertainty. But one of the key value propositions that Nerdio brings to the table is optimisation, specifically around cost.
When we started our journey, it was primarily around optimising cloud infrastructure and helping MSPs do more with less, being able to provide a reliable, high performance virtual desktop service to their customers and have a very efficiently managed, automatically managed infrastructure that would give them lots of room for margin.
So when we started our journey back in, let’s say 2018, MSPs were afraid to use Azure, because if you go to the Azure calculator and you price out an equivalent environment to what you would normally buy with an on-prem server it would seem to be much more expensive than just buying the physical hardware itself. And what we’ve sort of taught the MSPs is if you optimise things properly, if you have automated auto scaling in place, you actually get the margin profile that’s much higher than you can get by purchasing the hardware outright and reselling it to your customer.
What are the biggest misconceptions MSPs still have about cloud automation — and what’s holding them back from fully embracing it?
I think it’s maybe just a lack of understanding as to how it works and what it does, and the benefits that it can provide. I think certainly the forward thinking MSPs that are building a modern practice that’s centred on cloud like Azure certainly wouldn’t be going to market with an offering that doesn’t have some sort of automated optimisation and management built in. That’s because cloud management resources, finding the people with the right sets of skills and keeping them always trained and up to speed on all of the changes that, let’s say, Microsoft is putting out there, that’s a very expensive proposition.
Without the right set of tooling, primarily around automation, it’s very difficult to do and very difficult to be profitable in that type of business. So we work with MSPs, who are trying to build this type of a modern practice where automation is at the core of what they’re doing and how they’re staying efficient with the service delivery that they provide.
How do you see Nerdio’s role evolving as Microsoft itself continues to invest heavily in automation, Co-pilot and AI-driven management tools?
I think the role of Nerdio is actually continuing to expand. We always say that our job is to abstract complexity, and the more products there are, the more options, the more licensing models, the more capabilities, which tends to be the direction. There’s more and more of everything in technology. The more complexity that exists, it’s difficult for MSPs and their customers to make the right decisions. It’s more difficult for you to manage it on an ongoing basis.
And that’s really our opportunity. We come in, we curate the list of services, we tie them all together. We provide an easy to use UI pre-canned automations that lets MSPs tame the complexity and manage the environments in a very simple way. That’s the core part of the mission. Our job is to simplify the lives of IT administrators and help them maximise their investments in Microsoft Cloud and end-user computing environments.
The MSP tool landscape is increasingly crowded. What do you see as Nerdio’s superpower or key differentiator in that landscape?
It’s being able to extract the complexity and simplify the lives of IT professionals, whether these IT professionals are managed service providers or administrators within large IT organisations in big enterprise customers. Those are our two key audiences, and we do the same thing for both, and make their lives easier, let them sleep at night. And instead of having to wake up at two in the morning to try to check on some process that’s supposed to be running automatically, running in the background, we make that easy for them.
What keeps you up at night when you think about the biggest challenges in the MSP landscape?
I would say the biggest challenge for us right now is just continuing our growth and continuing scaling at the rate at which we’re growing. And we always say that the hardest thing to do is scaling people and finding the right people and making sure that they fit the culture – they fit our mission and vision of the company.
And because the market opportunities are so large and so present, we have the right technology to take advantage of it. Building up our own organisation by finding the right people, I would say, is probably our biggest challenge. I think, as it is for every organisation, it’s always built on people, and finding those people is not as easy as we’d like it to be.
Out of all the announcements you made at NerdioCon 2025, which of those do you think will have the biggest impact?
The thing that’s likely to have the biggest impact is the enhanced management for Windows 365 that’s currently available in our enterprise product. Eventually it will be available in our MSP product as well. And the reason I say that is because, if you think about desktop virtualisation, it’s a market that has existed for a while, but only about 10% of Windows endpoints, Windows PCs out there in the world are virtualised today.
That number isn’t likely to change, unless there is a dramatic shift in the technology and Windows 365 is that new technology that makes it possible to take a physical PC and make that into a cloud PC that’s delivered through Azure global data centre network.
So I think having Windows 365 that’s easy to manage, that’s priced and optimized appropriately, could really create a significant move of the 90% of endpoints. And think about it – hundreds of millions of devices that are out there running Windows and laptops that could then be moved into the cloud. Because it’s the last major workload that hasn’t yet moved to the cloud. Everything else, pretty much – email, databases, CRM, what have you – everything is already cloud-based. The one last thing that’s predominantly physical is the endpoint, and Windows 365, I think, is the technology that is going to change it over the coming years.
Everyone’s talking about AI and Co-pilot. What’s hype vs. reality when it comes to how AI will impact MSP operations over the next couple of years?
The way I think about AI is really in three different buckets. Bucket number one is using AI capabilities to enable our own product to be better at certain things. And we’ve started that journey. At NerdioCon last year I announced that our initiative was to infuse AI through other products, which we’ve done. And what I mean by that is, in a very pragmatic way, taking AI models and AI capabilities like computer vision and integrating it into our product, and creating functionality on top of it. I think that capability and AI’s ability to help is already there. We’re using it in the product. We’re going to continue expanding the use cases for it.
So I would say that’s bucket number one. Bucket number two is using AI internally for Nerdio as an organisation. Using it for marketing, using it in support, using the off-the-shelves AI products to make ourselves more efficient and productive as an organisation. And we’ve started doing that as well.
I think, like most organisations out there, different people are figuring out the most efficient ways to use it for themselves. I wouldn’t say we’ve solved exactly how we’re going to use AI and justify spending whatever it’s costing us to buy those licenses.
So that’s bucket number two. Then bucket number three is helping our customers, who are the MSPs and enterprise IT organisations, manage AI within their own environments.
So not using it internally, not building into our product, but helping them manage their applications that are using AI within their environment. And I don’t think we’re there yet. I think that as AI evolves and people figure out what applications they will be building with AI, there will be an opportunity for us to come in and help optimise that experience – just like we’ve done with compute, with storage, with virtual desktops.
When adoption of AI grows, Nerdio would have an opportunity to help optimise and simplify that process. So I don’t have a holistic answer as to what that’s going to look like, or what the right set of capabilities are, but I know that we’re integrating AI into our product. We’re using it internally to an extent, and we are waiting to see how customers will start adopting it to then start helping them be more efficient with it.
What are the traits of the most successful MSPs you work with? What sets them apart from the rest of the pack?
MSPs that are willing to change and willing to adapt to the way the market is evolving. I’ll give you an example of MSPs that are unlikely to succeed. MSPs who figure out a business model – let’s say around on-premise hardware. There are many MSPs out there who say “okay, I’m going to invest X into a set of server infrastructure. I’m going to depreciate it over a certain number of years. I’m going to structure my contract in a certain way, this is going to be my margin profile.” They figure out that business, they go into that business.
And even as the market underneath them is changing, even this cloud is becoming the new way IT is delivered, they’re unwilling to let go of a model that they know is working. And I think their model will continue working until it stops. And they will be in a position where they haven’t modernised their practice, they haven’t kept up with the technology, and they don’t have a future proof business model.
I think MSPs that educate themselves, that look at what’s going on in the market and are constantly experimenting and modifying and evolving their business models are the ones that are likely to be successful.
Looking to the future — what’s your boldest prediction for how the role of MSPs will change by 2030?
I think there’s always going to be a role for a technology advisor to a small and mid sized business. Small and mid-sized businesses are unlikely to ever insource enough high quality IT talent to not need an external advisor helping them figure out the technology landscape.
And by the looks of it, the way technology is evolving, it’s getting more complicated, more difficult to do. So I think the role of the MSP is growing rather than shrinking.
What the MSP market will look like, whether it’s going to be less concentrated, more concentrated, or whether there’s going to be consolidation, it’s hard for me to predict. The trend certainly seems to be that MSPs who figure out a model that’s standardised, reproducible and scalable, are able to roll up a lot of smaller MSPs, who are not able to figure that out.
So perhaps the world will look like having fewer, larger MSPs rather than more, smaller MSPs, which is what it looks like today. That seems to be the trend. If you force me to make a prediction, I would say the space will get consolidated a bit more, and we’ll see MSPs focus on SMB customers, but they are at larger scale with a lot more automation and tooling doing the day to day work for them.
Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash
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