The Xurrent MSP Blog Series: ITSMs and MSPs The Ideal Partnership
I’ve been helping companies implement IT service management for two decades. That includes architecting and implementing more than 200 ITSM installations worldwide. Thus the grey hair :). I have worked with the big (legacy) names but more than half of those have been with Xurrent. I have worked with organizations from every industry, and been involved in dozens of implementations with “Managed Service Providers.” I’ve witnessed the collaboration between organizations and MSPs from both sides of the table, providing me with a deep understanding of both.
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are companies whose core business is to provide managed technologies and services to other companies. MSPs come in many different shapes and sizes, providing different services and also differing models to offer these services. Two primary categories of MSPs are IT-as-a-Service providers and Co-managed providers.
- IT-as-a-Service providers. These MSPs typically either provision or host services including email, IT service help desk, remote monitoring and maintenance, Network Operations Center, managed virtual desktop, managed devices or other hosted private or public cloud based services.
- Co-managed providers. These MSPs often will manage the technologies or services already consumed or purchased by their customers. Working on their customers’ behalf, it’s not uncommon that these MSPs will be working “within” the customer environment to ensure service delivery. These can include many IT resellers, network, security or infrastructure specialists, and enterprise solution providers for vendors like SAP, Microsoft, and the like.
Recently, MSP shops have significantly increased their use of Xurrent. MSP usage growth has been so remarkable that during our Connect ’24 global user and partner conference, we dedicated a special session to discussing the use of Xurrent in the MSP market. What’s driving this rapid adoption? Well, there are a couple of drivers. First, there’s a specific need in the market that Xurrent addresses. Second, the Xurrent platform is particularly well-suited for the MSP use case.
The Space Between is Growing
MSPs are no strangers to using best-of-breed technologies to deliver their services to the market. For example, an MSP serving the SMB market leans on a remote monitoring and maintenance (RMM) tool like N-Able, Kaseya, Connectwise or Ninja. The same vendor set often offers CRM and professional services automation (PSA) to help MSPs manage their business. More SME or enterprise MSPs likely also choose a monitoring product for the performance of infrastructure, network or converged application environments. LogicMonitor, DataDog, PRTG, SolarWinds, and ScienceLogic are the most common vendors. They might also have a tool for remote desktop or powering any one of their managed services.
Larger or more mature MSPs will move to an ITSM product to provide a more robust approach to IT service delivery. Unfortunately, traditional ITSM players are not well-suited for this task due to the limitations of their on-premise or single-tenant software architecture. That’s where Xurrent fits in.
ITSM Purpose-built for Managed Services Environments
In that space between, there’s a growing need for ensuring IT service delivery. Today’s businesses must keep up with technology change while providing the appropriate IT services to their employees. That likely means cloud-first, dynamic environments that are easy to deploy, and maintain, without requiring loads of professional services. These MSPs want a solution that is flexible to their service delivery needs to cover not only essential IT services and a portal for their employees to consume the service catalogue – but also a solution they can offer to their customers as part of a larger outsourcing contract. Such customers require seamless collaboration with their MSP but oftentimes also require interconnected services across their organization (like finance, HR, facilities, etc.). That together is a set of requirements that can only be fulfilled by a very complete and advanced ITSM platform.
Xurrent’s modern, secure, and fast-to-deploy multi-tenant SaaS architecture supports role-based access control, enabling MSPs to configure secure, separate data environments for their customers. Xurrent’s unique “trust” system seamlessly connects different ITSM instances without requiring additional integrations, allowing customers to maintain independent Xurrent accounts connected to the service provider’s account. This ensures customers control their own environments and data, even when the administration of Xurrent is outsourced to the MSP for the duration of the outsourcing contract.
Xurrent’s Trust relations are unique, delivering integrations through the normal user interface of the product that does not require consultancy. The Trusts automatically upgrade with the Xurrent platform, and all testing and necessary upgrades are done by Xurrent at no additional cost. And the best part is the functionality provided by these integrations via the Trust is much more advanced than anything on the market today. This includes sending incidents, problems, tasks, changes, etc from one system to another and keeping them in sync. Additionally, Trusts offer advanced features such as sharing roles, outsourcing administrator tasks, handing over the support responsibility for items in the CMDB, allowing approval requests, creating shared workflows, and more. This allows different teams to collaborate in projects and ensures that all services are visible in the service catalog of the organization’s service catalog! These are just some of the benefits offered by the unique capabilities of the Xurrent platform.
Whether you are a current customer 
or an MSP keeping up on what’s new in service management, I hope you enjoyed this blog! Stay tuned for the next blog in the series where we will continue to provide you with information about Xurrent and the MSP market!
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