‘By removing operational noise, we give them back about 1,500 productive hours per employee each year. That time can go toward learning AI, building consultative services and finding new opportunities with customers,’ says Juan Fernandez, CEO of Summit Holdings.
A new MSP operating model just launched built to make service delivery simpler and cut down on operational overhead for service providers.
The model, MSP-as-a-Service (MSPaaS), comes from Dallas-based holding company Summit Holdings’ recent acquisition of NOCDOC. The Winston-Salem, N.C.-based provider of a 24×7 Network Operations Center (NOC), a Security Operations center [SOC] and service desk services has supported MSPs for 25 years. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. All of NOCDOC’s employees, between 40 and 60, are coming over in the deal.
Under the MSPaaS model, NOCDOC provides the operational backbone from monitoring to security operations to support while partners retain full control of customer relationships, branding and sales.
Juan Fernandez (pictured), Summit Holdings CEO, said the idea emerged from years of watching MSPs struggle to grow beyond operational bottlenecks.
[Related: MSP Owners Group Parent Firm Summit Holdings Taps New Executive Team: Exclusive]
“Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time talking with MSPs and paying attention to what actually activates growth for them,” he told CRN. “But I kept seeing the same thing: people stuck running the same playbook because they didn’t have a bridge to the future. They’re thinking, ‘I’ve got to move forward into AI and new services, but I still have all these operational problems to solve.’ There just wasn’t a bridge there. So we started hauling wood to build one.”
MSPaaS compresses the traditional timeline required for MSPs to scale services, he said.
“Thirty [percent] to 45 percent of MSP revenue typically goes into labor,” he said. “It can take 90 days just to hire someone and get them to their first ticket.”
By providing ready-to-deploy infrastructure, MSPaaS allows MSPs to expand offerings without hiring additional staff. And the platform supports the full life cycle of managed services, including presales engineering, co-selling and co-marketing support, on-boarding, white-label service delivery and quarterly business review assistance. All services are delivered by U.S.-based technical teams and follow Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL )- aligned and Center for Internet Security (CIS)-mapped frameworks.
The goal was to remove friction so MSPs could focus on growth and strategy rather than day-to-day support demands. “We took what used to be a 12-month activation cycle, from signing vendors to hiring staff and generating revenue, and compressed it to day one,” Fernandez said. “Now they can activate profitability immediately.”
The platform operates on a per-user model designed to replace an MSP’s internal operations budget rather than cut into margins. That means MSPs can maintain margins of between about 30 percent and 50 percent.
“The first question we ask MSPs is simple: ‘How much money do you want to make?’” he said. “Once we understand that, we help them structure pricing and scope so they can hit those margins.
“By removing operational noise, we give them back about 1,500 productive hours per employee each year,” he added. “That time can go toward learning AI, building consultative services and finding new opportunities with customers.”
The MSPaaS platform also integrates with a range of existing tools from vendors including Kaseya, HaloPSA, NinjaOne and SentinelOne, to name a few. And the service is designed for startup MSPs all the way to private equity-backed companies. Early stage MSPs can gain instant enterprise-level capabilities, midsize MSPs can streamline their tech stack and operations, and larger MSPs can replace outsourced support models.
“I built this bridge intentionally so MSPs can cross into the next era,” Fernandez said. “Not everyone will take the journey, and that’s OK. But the ones who do, I can’t wait to see what they build next.”
