‘People already have Halo, and they don’t know that it can do this. They can sign up tomorrow as a partner, and they can go upmarket, create more annual recurring revenue and generate 50 percent annual recurring revenue,’ says Halo executive Tim Barton-Wines.
Halo is looking to give small and midsize MSPs a way to move further upmarket by using its platform to deliver managed services to larger customers, positioning the company’s ServiceNow alternative as a potential new revenue engine for partners.
While the Ipswich, U.K.-based professional services automation (PSA) vendor has a busy agenda across the remainder of 2026 and into 2027, Halo executive Tim Barton-Wines said its roadmap is largely driven by customer requests rather than a single sweeping initiative.
One area of opportunity for MSPs is using Halo ITSM to serve lower-enterprise and midmarket customers with a model typically dominated by global systems integrators such as Accenture, Deloitte and DXC, which typically sell, implement and manage ServiceNow for Fortune 500 customers. Halo is looking to give smaller MSPs a way to offer a similar model further down the market.
Halo ITSM, Barton-Wines said, can serve as a full alternative to ServiceNow, with domain-separation capabilities that allow MSPs to connect their own Halo environment with a customer’s instance while keeping each organization’s data and operations separated. This can lead to larger recurring contracts without requiring MSPs to build an entirely new technology stack.
“People already have Halo, and they don’t know that it can do this,” he told CRN. “They can sign up tomorrow as a partner, and they can go upmarket, create more annual recurring revenue and generate 50 percent annual recurring revenue.”
He added that opportunities can range from about $5,000 to more than $100,000 per customer annually, depending on the size and scope of the managed service.
James Rocker, CEO of Hauppauge, N.Y.-based Halo partner Nerds That Care, said Halo’s flexibility has become one of its biggest advantages, particularly as MSPs tailor the platform to different parts of their businesses.
“We were a ConnectWise shop, and before that, an Autotask shop, so we’ve been through the flavors of the main PSA tools,” he said. “Halo’s been great. The PSA tools are customizable, so you can make it really what you need it to be. One of the women who works in my accounting department was able to customize a dashboard on her own that worked for the finance team. It’s tremendous what you can do with the Halo software.”
The opportunity also extends into AI services, as MSPs can build automation and AI capabilities internally on Halo and then offer those capabilities to customers using the platform.
“The best stuff you’ll create with AI is internal as an MSP,” Barton-Wines said. “You’re building it on Halo, and then you’re going to sell that to your customer who’s also using Halo.”
The upmarket push is part of a broader strategy for Halo as it looks toward 2027. Rather than rapidly expanding its sales organization, the focus is on working with larger MSPs while developing partner networks and internal teams that can support broader adoption.
“We run very lean as an organization,” Barton-Wines said. “It’s a product-first approach. Build it, and they will come. We rely heavily on the product leading the way and reputation, like word of mouth, to deliver results.”
And that product-led approach has helped fuel more than four straight years of greater than 100 percent growth, but he said Halo is not rushing to add salespeople simply to land more customers.
“There’s no benefit in hiring a load of salespeople or getting a load of partners to win customers for them to have a low-quality onboarding or low-quality support,” he said. “They won’t like Halo and that affects our reputation.”
Instead, Halo plans to continue investing in the platform and gradually expand its ability to support MSPs at scale.
“We’re a software company. You buy the product and we arrange ourselves internally to create the best scenarios for what makes the best product,” he said. “We’ve had 20 people working together for 15 years, and the speed they can work with our framework leads to greater results.”
CRN has reached out to ServiceNow for comment. Halo’s latest move comes about two months after that company announced it was ramping up innovation around AI, extending its reach into smaller businesses.
During the company’s fiscal Q2 2026 earnings call in July, Chairman and CEO Bill McDermott said the company will introduce a revamped business model aimed at broadening its addressable market with AI-native offerings.
