Facing rising client expectations and growing price pressure, managed service providers (MSPs) are turning to automation not just to save money but to stay competitive.
At NerdioCon 2025 in La Quinta, California, we caught up with Jeremy Wallace, principal cloud architect at IT services company Safari Micro, to chat about how the MSP landscape is evolving. He explains how tools from the likes of Microsoft cloud management firm, Nerdio, are helping MSPs simplify Azure environments, onboard clients faster and free up senior engineers for more strategic work.
But, while automation offers clear benefits, Wallace stresses that without proper planning and architecture, it can create costly problems further down the line. From the increasing role of AI to the rise of hybrid cloud, Wallace shares his perspective on where MSPs should focus next, what mistakes to avoid and why adaptability will be key to success in the years ahead.
How would you describe the current economic pressures facing MSPs, and how is that changing conversations around automation and efficiency?
In general, you’re dealing with clients themselves that are very price conscious at every level. So for us, one, it creates a bit of a drive in the competitive area against other MSPs, about pricing and services involved in that, and then how you differentiate yourselves from one another.
It seems like every client is always looking for an MSP that can provide better services at a better price. So they’re always shopping for different companies in that area. For us, we’ve had to really define what’s the differentiator. How are we different from other MSPs? It’s become about just quality. For our company, specifically, we want to make sure that we are actual experts in areas and provide service to them, and justify the pricing that we give them.
But no matter how expert you are, at a certain price point people are not going to go with you. So we’re looking for ways to automate. We’re looking for ways to templatise, to bring our costs down when we’re working with them. Even though we do have the experts, we’re trying to find ways, whether it’s AI, whether it’s automation platforms, to bring our costs down so that we can pass that on to the client.
Are there any particular tasks that MSPs are most keen to automate at the moment, and why would that be?
It really depends on what their niche is. For us, the initial onboarding of a client and bringing them up to our standards is usually the most time consuming piece. Finding a way to automate that process so that they’re onboarded faster, our higher engineers have to spend less time in that process, then that helps break our costs down, and so that the onboarding theory can be extended out a very long time depending on what the client’s environment is. So the more we can automate that, the more that we can throw out we already have pre designed templates and things like that, the faster that is for us.
Nerdio seems to think it’s changed the game for MSPs managing Microsoft Azure environments. Do you agree? And how has it done that?
Yes. We started with the Azure virtual Desktop side. I’ll start there, and then kind of address how they’ve grown. We tried doing Azure Virtual Desktop and Azure Management before Nerdio, and it did take a high degree of engineers that needed to be constantly involved with the process. When you have those kind of engineers with the process, it’s going to be a lot more costly for us and for the client as a result.
When we brought Nerdio In towards the end of 2020, we were already looking for ways to automate some of those processes, and we were trying to build it ourselves. That is also expensive to create those processes ourselves. We found out Nerdio was already excelling in those areas, so when we brought them in, they immediately cut out a lot of my time at an architect level, where I’m trying to design processes and make sure that everything is coherent, to a certain standard that we have. Nerdio really addressed that. And, for us, especially on the Virtual Desktop side, they were a game changer in a way that we hadn’t really seen with any other company as they’ve grown into modern work.
Now we’re seeing a lot of the other stuff that we deal with for clients on the Microsoft 365 side, managing mailboxes, SharePoint, Teams etc – Nerdio has brought that stuff in the past year into their program. We’re starting to see them kind of revolutionise that as well. So we’re able to bring in clients and have automatic deployments out to all of our clients at the same time, instead of having to handle each one individually.
For MSPs early in their Nerdio journey, where do you see the fastest wins or easiest areas to drive automation and cost savings?
Probably the easiest one is on the Azure. That’s the side they start out with. It’s ultimately the strongest in their environment. So if they’re looking to bring their clients into the cloud in an Azure environment, Nerdio makes it very quick with very easy onboarding.
If it’s an absolutely new environment for a client, this is the first time in the cloud users building something new. Nerdio just has a quick walkthrough that helps them set up an entire environment. If you’re taking over an environment, it’s also a quick walkthrough just to take over that environment. The harder part is if they’re transitioning them from an on-premise environment into a cloud environment. You still need to have people like me involved with the migration architecture side of it, but once you get through that initial move to the cloud, Nerdio makes it easy for them to stay in the cloud.
How are roles inside MSPs evolving because of automation tools like Nerdio? What skills or mindsets are becoming more valuable?
The automation side of things brings the day to day work tasks that are involved in managing the environment down. So the skill set for those people can be a lot lower. I think you still need your very high level architectural people to oversee that. But I think it reduces a lot of the middle area, so you can have green people brought into this environment. Nerdio has a very good training program to get them up to speed. We’ve had engineers that we brought on that had no Virtual Desktop, no Azure background. We brought them to the Nerdio training and then they are able to support the Nerdio environment, because Nerdio has brought that threshold down.
Where do you see Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem heading next in terms of partner opportunity?
I’m a Microsoft MVP, and I was just at the Redmond campus about two weeks ago. It’s very obvious that AI has become the topic to focus on for a lot of organisations. Even Nerdio has had those conversations of how do we incorporate AI into our program?
I think you’re going to see Microsoft continue to develop on what AI looks like in the modern workplace. They’ve done that with Co-pilot, and they’re continuing to evolve Co-pilot and Co-pilot agents, and make AI an everyday regular part of our lives.
So what’s the next step from there? What’s the next evolution of AI? And how is our partner community involved in that process? A lot of that right now still looks like, how do we secure environments? How do we take data and make it something that can be ingested in AI? But I really think we still haven’t quite scratched the surface on where’s the true ultimate value of AI. Where does AI ultimately start making organisations money and things like that.
Are there specific Azure services or capabilities that MSPs are still underutilising — but should be leaning into a bit more?
Yeah. And this is actually another direction that Microsoft is heading in with what they call the adaptable cloud. Not only do we have Azure in the cloud, and there was this initiative to move everybody to the cloud, but now there’s an initiative to bring the cloud to the clients.
So we have something called Azure Local now, formerly Azure Stack HCI. It doesn’t necessarily need to be all cloud or on premise for clients. Now we can look at maybe moving 80% of your environment to the cloud. Let’s keep some of it on premise. What do those workloads look like? Can they move back and forth? Are they adaptable? That type of stuff.
I think we’ll continue to see a hybrid cloud be a focus in Azure, as people are starting to realise that if they don’t have a good handle of the cloud it’s overly expensive for them, which is why organisations like Nerdio automation tools. Part of the appeal is that they help bring costs down with automation. But I think you also have clients out there that are realising it doesn’t make sense for everything to be in the cloud. So Microsoft’s answering that with this Azure Local solution.
What mistakes do you see MSPs commonly make, especially when approaching automation — and how can they avoid them?
I think because of how well automation tools work, people tend to jump in and they just start building stuff. That’s kind of the way in the cloud, in general, Azure makes it almost deceptively easy just to start building stuff and generating costs.
People forget architecture needs to be involved, proper planning and architecture, looking at that holistically. You can you can start building a home, and you might be able to build a shack, but it’s probably going to fall apart on you at some point if you don’t think about the actual architecture. It’s the same with these automation tools in the clouds. If you don’t have that foundational architecture in place, when you go to start utilising this stuff, at some point it’s going to get too big, too messy and it’s going to fall apart.
What excites you most about the future of MSPs and what do you think the MSP landscape will look like in a few years?
I absolutely love the changing technological landscape. I loved when AI was introduced. I love the element of the unknown in there, because it seems like every new thing that comes out is almost like it’s Christmas morning all over again. There’s something new to play with.
It also scares the heck out of a lot of people, seeing all those new things and those unknowns. But I really think it drives us to elevate. We have to figure out how we use those technologies, whether it’s AI and Co-pilot, whether it’s other automation platforms, and how we can use this to make money as a business and then continue to innovate and help our clients.
That may also change our jobs as we move forward. There may be certain roles that won’t exist in the future. Even technological wise, we wouldn’t necessarily need an engineer for this. Maybe that’s replaced by AI at some point in time, but for the foreseeable future, people are still going to be involved. It just depends. They may have to adapt their roles. I think being adaptable is fun to me, but it’s also scary to a lot of people.
Photo by redcharlie on Unsplash
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