Five Interesting Thoughts from…Michael George
The CEO of managed services software vendor Syncro shares insights about AI, security, and Galileo.
Michael George is a long-time tech industry executive and investor familiar to many MSPs as the former CEO of Continuum, the managed services platform maker acquired by ConnectWise in 2019. Since last February, he’s been CEO of another managed services platform maker, Syncro, and taking on not just ConnectWise but Kaseya, NinjaOne, and N-able too for market share and MSP loyalty.
George joined co-host Erick Simpson and me on Channel Mastered’s MSP Chat podcast recently to discuss the current and future managed services landscape, as well as an imminently forthcoming move in his plan for vaulting Syncro ahead of the competition. Here are five of many thoughts he shared during that conversation:
1. Cost is not the variable MSPs should be focusing on when evaluating tools. “If you’re worried about your tools cost, you have a whole different set of problems,” George contends. “If you look at your P&L, it’s all about the labor.”
Or more accurately, qualified labor. From the industry’s very beginning, George says, the core challenge to running a successful managed services practice “has been a skills gap problem. It continues to be a skills gap problem.” AI, he continues, can help remediate that problem by reducing service delivery costs, improving service delivery quality, and freeing up more time for human-to-human interaction with customers.
2. MSPs as we know them today will soon be a rarity. Because most MSPs will have become MSSPs instead.
“The idea of an MSP and an MSSP is going to converge,” George predicts. “The traditional concept of an MSP may not completely go away. It won’t be an extinct species. But it’ll be as antiquated and immaterial to the market as the traditional break-fix providers.” Everyone who wishes to remain relevant “is going to have to be an MSSP.”
3. End users today must be “risk aware.” As opposed to risk averse, George says, because risk-taking is an intrinsic part of business. Security risk, on the other hand, is incredibly dangerous, and no company can afford to have less than a close eye on it at all times.
“Be risk aware, because the liability of security is falling now on the shoulders of executives and then therefore their agents, their CIOs and CISOs,” George says. The stakes are high too, he adds, referencing a famous incident two years ago at Uber.
“We had a situation where a CISO got sentenced to prison,” George says.
4. No matter how seriously they take security, no MSP can provide clients complete immunity from threats. To promise you can, according to George, “is a very dangerous and inappropriate statement to make, because nobody is 100% safe and secure.” After all, even an MSP’s own employees sometimes fall for phishing lures. “As I like to say, there is no patch for stupidity,” George observes.
Better, then, to level with customers that security is as much their job as yours. “Be smart and make sure that you hold your customer accountable and let them know that we are all responsible for security,” George advises.
5. The future of managed services software is heliocentric. “For nearly 300,000 years, humankind believed that the universe revolved around the earth,” George says. Then Galileo proved that the earth in fact revolves around the sun. Today, George argues, managed services platform makers all have a geocentric view of the market in which everything revolves around them and their products. This spring, Syncro will introduce something designed to be heliocentric instead.
“This is going to be the most transformational thing since the beginning of the managed services industry, when it went from a break-fix industry into a remote managed services industry,” George says. “This will be as transformational a shift as that was.”
So who’s the sun in that vision, and how will Syncro’s offering reflect that? “Stay tuned,” George says. “More to come.” You can hear everything he had to say about his heliocentric ambitions for Syncro, as well as his thoughts about AI and security, by tuning into the entire podcast here.
