Fourteen MSPs and individuals received special awards during the MSP Summit MSP 501 Gala this week.

The Gala was the culmination of the 2026 MSP Summit in Orlando, FL. There was a total of 57 Special Awards finalists in nine categories, reduced from a record number of nominees.

Here are the winners:

MSPs of the Year (3 winners)

Akati Sekurity

Akati Sekurity is a security-first MSP that has built every operational discipline around the assumption that adversaries could be inside its clients’ perimeters at any moment. Half of its revenue comes from security services. Based in Malaysia, Akati operates across five continents serving more than 400 clients across 40 countries. Its differentiation is anchored in four proprietary platforms, including a BlackHawk proprietary AI engine. For Akati, agentic AI is beyond the experiment stage and is currently a commercial line. In 2025 Akati managed 261,553 end users, 455,119 endpoints, 35,211 servers and network devices, and 64,844 virtual machines under contract, all from in-house NOC, SOC, and Help Desk operations.

IFX Networks

Over the past two years, IFX Networks has executed a clear, multi-layered expansion strategy across Latin America, combining infrastructure growth, geographic expansion, service innovation, and strategic partnerships. IFX entered new markets such as El Salvador and strengthened its presence in Central America through acquisitions in Costa Rica, Chile, and Honduras, while continuing to scale operations across 18 countries.

IFX also made massive investments in infrastructure and modernization. These included $14 million in Colombia to deploy new Tier III data centers and expand fiber networks, while also upgrading cloud capabilities in Argentina and other markets. IFX incorporated Starlink satellite technology to extend enterprise-grade connectivity into underserved and remote areas, enhancing resilience and coverage. IFX strengthened its position as a strategic partner with investments in AI-ready infrastructure, cybersecurity, multicloud, and 24/7 managed services. IFX’s growing network of 27 interconnected data centers and over 93,000 miles of fiber, enables low-latency, high-availability services region-wide.

Sourcepass

Melville, NY-based Sourcepass has focused on scaling nationally while preserving the high-touch client experience that often gets lost as companies grow. Sourcepass supports clients across 49 states while maintaining the philosophy of “Intimacy at Scale.” Since 2022, Sourcepass has successfully acquired and integrated 13 companies into a unified operating model while continuing to achieve strong organic growth and operational maturity. By Q1 2026, the company achieved 102% net revenue retention, 9% year-over-year organic growth, and 13% total adjusted EBITDA growth.

Sourcepass’ Quest is a proprietary platform combining automation, operational visibility, and client experience management. By leveraging AI, automation, and workflow orchestration across service operations, Sourcepass has reimagined how MSP services are delivered and experienced.

Treating its employees as its greatest asset, Sourcepass offers benefits and PTO programs designed to compete with Fortune 500 organizations while fostering a people-first culture centered around long-term growth, support, and opportunity. The Sourcepass Community Impact Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to supporting the communities where its employees and clients live and work, has supported more than 150 charitable organizations.

MSP Executives of the Year (3 winners)

Jess Bergeron, Personified COO

Under Jess’s executive leadership, Personified achieved 32% top-line revenue growth last year while simultaneously scaling the organization by 24% in employee growth. She also champions the thoughtful adoption of AI-driven tools and automation initiatives that streamline workflows, improve reporting visibility, and enhance scalability across departments. These operational improvements enable teams to work more efficiently while supporting continued company growth. Financially, the company continues to improve operational performance and EBITDA margins while strategically investing in long-term growth initiatives, AI expansion, and internal infrastructure.

Personified serves more than 125 client partners, has maintained 97% client retention since 2021, and earned national recognition including #241 on the Inc. 5000, #5 on the 2025 MSP 501 list, and 2025 Woman-Powered MSP of the Year. The MSP’s achievements reflect not only sales growth, but a team that is aligned, accountable, and consistently delivering.

Serge Bukhar, Atlas Technica CEO

Bukhar has led the way for Atlas Technica to grow significantly over the last 10 years by providing a consistent, superior experience to clients throughout the alternative investment industry, with minimal attrition. The MSP has increased its customer base to more than 250 dedicated hedge funds, private equity firms, family offices, real estate organizations and much more. Atlas Technica has nearly 400 employees with expansion planned through investment in its management and service teams. With more than 5,000 supported users and 9,000 managed end points, Bukhar’s team thrives to consistently provide best-in-class solutions. The company grew more than 70% in 2025 and is having another great year in 2026.

Brian Strong, TenHats CEO

When Strong joined TenHats in early 2021, the company was generating $2 million in annual revenue. By the end of 2025, TenHats closed at $19 million. That's 845% growth in five years, achieved entirely through organic sales — no acquisitions, no private equity, no shortcuts. Every dollar comes from new clients and expanded relationships, built through a structured outside sales organization Strong built.

TenHats’ sales success under Strong represents a complete financial turnaround. The MSP went from losing money to profitability in two years, and in 2025 it generated $2.24 million in net income. Monthly recurring revenue grew from roughly $1.5 million annually to over $10.7 million — a 613% increase in the most durable, highest-value revenue category in the managed services business. Average client MRR grew from $2,000 to $9,800 while client churn stayed below 5%. This turnaround was the result of Strong building the right sales infrastructure, installing the right process, and holding the team accountable to it every year.

AI MSPs of the Year (2 winners)

Framework IT

Framework IT deployed a series of AI-powered workflows and intelligent agents built on its own AI platform, Framework AI (powered by Hatz AI). Each solution was designed around Framework IT's existing or modified sales processes, trained on its own standards and proprietary data, and integrated into the tools the sales team already used. The approach was modular, not monolithic. The result was a system of semi-automated and fully automated workflows that dramatically cut the manual effort required at every stage. The agents and workflows were trained on Framework IT's own pre-sale documentation templates, meeting summary formats, pricing structures, contract language, and best practices roadmap. Outputs matched the company's standards from the start. The impact on sales operations, revenue performance, and employee satisfaction has been significant, as Framework IT has achieved a 75% reduction in administrative sales tasks. The seller now spends a fraction of the time previously required on research, documentation, follow-up, pricing, and contract preparation and more time on high-value selling. Framework IT has met or exceeded its net new logo sales targets, doubling its sales target in the fourth quarter of 2025.

XTIUM

XTIUM rebuilt its delivery economics around AI, first proven it internally, then productizing the result. Its proprietary AI orchestration platform, Agent Manager Suite, operates as a dual-purpose asset, powering its internal service automation while shipping as a customer-facing AI-managed service. The first production workload was the Ticket Hydration Bot: an AI agent that automatically categorizes, enriches, and prioritizes every inbound service desk ticket with customer context, device telemetry, and historical resolution patterns before any human touches it. Ticket Hydration is in production today, processing tens of thousands of service desk tickets every month. XTIUM’s AI 1.0 portfolio of six products is on a multi-year revenue trajectory with operating margins expanding throughout the process.

Vanguard MSP of the Year

Keystone Solutions

KeyStone Solutions’ advanced digital services blend available AI tools for the industry and custom-built proprietary solutions developed in-house to solve real operational problems. The centerpiece of this work is an AI/ML pipeline that has been applied to transform how Keystone handles service desk operations. Keystone’s machine learning system classifies, prioritizes, and assigns tickets automatically. The result is a dramatic reduction in manual ticket handling — freeing its engineers to focus on complex, high-value work instead of administrative sorting.

Keystone also developed a suite of automation scripts and AI agents that handle routine SMB support tasks, such as user provisioning, software deployment, compliance checks, and reporting, which are all triggered automatically rather than manually initiated. Its SOP Helper custom AI agent is a natural language chat interface built on top of a large language model API. This helps engineers avoid wasting time hunting for the right procedure when they need to act fast.

Newcomer MSP of the Year

Metro Sales

Metro Sales operates closer to a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) than most MSPs. It incorporates enterprise-grade security tooling as a baseline expectation, including SentinelOne, Huntress EDR/ITDR, Fortigate firewalls, and ThreatLocker. This is not positioned as a premium offering; it is framed as what clients should expect from any competent technology partner and is the only fully managed offering it offers. Metro Sales dedicates 25% of every employee's time to training, mentoring, and professional development, compared to an industry standard of more than 90% customer-facing time.

Metro Sales uses a cost analysis framework in its sales process to demonstrate the total cost of underperforming IT: downtime, productivity loss, security exposure, and positions its pricing against that full picture. The model also includes a formal AI services practice, structured in three stages: AI policy development, ongoing advisory sessions, and fractional virtual AI Strategist engagements. This was built proactively as both a client retention strategy and a genuine service expansion, recognizing that AI adoption without governance creates significant risk for SMBs.

MSP Digital Innovator of the Year

TechPulse Consulting

TechPulse’s QuantumOps transforms reactive IT support into proactive, AI-powered operations by embedding intelligence directly into tools MSPs already use. Built as a deeply integrated platform for HaloPSA (with AutoTask and ConnectWise Manage support planned), QuantumOps eliminates context-switching by delivering five AI-powered dashboards directly inside the PSA interface. It covers ticket intelligence, triage, client health, user profiling, and interactive resolution guidance.

Market validation has been strong. The Partner Beta waitlist filled rapidly after TechPulse demonstrated QuantumOps at Pax8 Beyond, with MSPs consistently saying they had been looking for exactly this kind of deeply integrated, AI-native operations platform. QuantumOps targets MSPs and IT departments of all sizes, with pricing structured around a BYOK (Bring Your Own Keys) model that lets customers control AI costs using their own API keys, or an all-inclusive tier with consumption built in — ensuring accessibility for smaller shops while scaling to enterprise operations.

The following awards were based on performance metrics, rather than through nomination and judging:

Woman-Powered MSP of the Year -- Lim Tze Hoon – FatNinjas.

Lim is GM of the Malaysian-based MSP, guiding it to the No. 102 ranking on the 2026 MSP 501. She has led FatNinjas since 2020 and has helped it became a fixture on the MSP 501.

Cybersecurity MSP of the Year -- RedHelm.

No. 16 on the 2026 MSP 501, RedHelm’s team has spent years on the front lines defending systems, restoring operations, and helping organizations recover after cyberattacks through a blend of offensive and defensive expertise.

Cloud MSP of the Year – Thrive

Thrive, No. 7 on the 2026 MSP 501, embraces the idea of a multi-cloud environment, leveraging private, public, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud platforms offering high performance, cost containment, enhanced cybersecurity, and flexibility. The ThriveCloud is housed in world-class SOC 2 Type II certified data centers around the world.