The managed services industry has long operated under a flawed assumption: that all MSPs are fundamentally similar. This misconception isn't just inaccurate—it's actively harming MSPs and their vendor relationships.
That was the message from Dina Moskowitz, PartnerOptimizer CEO, at her MSP Summit presentation MSPs Aren’t One-Size-Fits-All: Data That Changes the Game. After pointing out why it’s a problem, Moskowitz presented data that shows how different MSPs are from each other.
The Problem with Treating all MSPs the Same
“It’s been an underlying problem in our sector for many, many years, that MSPs are treated as if they're all the same company doing the same things, and vendors want to partner with all MSPs. It’s not really the truth,” she told a packed room of MSPs.
She said when she asks MSPs what they specialize in, the answers vary: networking, cloud, end-point protection, and other services.
“It's very clear and obvious that not all MSPs are the same, and we have the data that we can actually show to the industry,” Moskowitz added. “When you have the data and can customize that data to your ideal partner profile, the game can change.”
Dina Moskowitz
Data-Driven Partnership Strategy
PartnerOptimizer has partnered with the MSP Summit organizer, Channel Partners, to analyze data that both groups collect. “We’ll be able to segment the industry and show you in a much deeper way what we as a group of MSPs look like,” Moskowitz said.
She recalled a conversation when she asked an enterprise company’s VP of partnerships who that company considered an ideal partner. “She said ‘Oh, we’re just going after any MSP,’” Moskowitz said. “I looked through our data of their existing partners and showed them 34% of those MSPs were actually system integrators, 45% of them were focused on SMB and not enterprise, and 65% of their top focus was business productivity, not cybersecurity. And then 55% of her own partners had alignment with her competition. Those red flags made her realize that not all MSPs are the same, and that maybe she should look at things a little bit differently.”
Moskowitz shared a part of her data with her MSP Summit audience. PartnerOptimizer's NeuralPartner proprietary data mining engine builds detailed profiles of companies across the B2B tech sector. It analyzes tens of thousands of technology and partnership attributes per company — measuring frequency, context, and consistency — to determine alignment with expertise, products, customer focus, and business models. Its partner discovery and intelligence platform, PIPE, leverages proprietary algorithms to help organizations discover new partners, enrich and clean existing partner data, and evaluate aggregated insights on partner ecosystems and competitors.
PartnerOptimizer profiles and tracks more than 46,000 pure-play MSPs, as well as millions of other partner company types in the B2B technology space, including ISVs, SIs, ERP Consultants, SaaS and more. Its data shows that MSP 501 companies are much more active than MSPs in general in selling the top seven technology categories – cybersecurity, storage/backup/DR, productivity/collaboration/business apps, AI and automation, data center/IT infrastructure, cloud computing/hosting, and devices and edge. MSP 501 companies are more than twice as likely to sell storage/data protection (81% to 40%) and devices/edge (62% to 24%) than all pure-play MSPs. And 92% of MSP 501ers sell cybersecurity compared to 47% of total MSPs. These figures show a significant difference in the way different-sized MSPs operate.
For MSPs not yet in the 501, this data provides a roadmap for growth. “Pay attention to what the MSP 501 are doing because you want to grow into something like them,” she tells MSPs not on the 501. “It's great to see and benchmark how they're doing, and we'll be hopefully doing this for you on a quarterly basis.”
MSP Vendor Alignment Patterns
MSPs can also use her data to find which vendors fit into their main technology focus.
Looking at MSPs’ vendor alignment, MSP 501 companies are far more active with Microsoft (95% to 62%), Google (70% to 41%), Dell (49% to 26%) and Apple (40% to 19%) than all pure-play MSPs are. Those vendors are the top four brands that MSP 501ers align with, and that matches the MSP 501 Preferred Vendor selections.
The implications extend beyond individual MSP strategy. Understanding these differences enables precision partnering across the entire ecosystem. It also helps MSPs and vendors find their ideal partners.
“I think you're going to be able to learn very much about the ability to precision, partner and target with intention, and the value of that and how you can accomplish that nowadays,” she said. “You want distributors to be much more intentional in the types of products and solutions they’re bringing to you as an MSP. If you’re a vendor, you want the right [MSP] partners. But the problem is -- the big elephant that's been in the room for years and years -- is that vendors think of MSPs as all being the same.”
And we have data to prove that’s not true.