In this CPTV interview, I spoke with Onyx founder John Dusett about how his company can help MSPs go to market faster and more profitably with Microsoft. He also discussed how Microsoft added a “massive tailwind” that helped shifts billions of dollars of Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) deals towards partners.
The Onyx CSP Growth Engine platform provides AI-powered licensing advice to help support Microsoft partners. Dusett and his Onyx co-founders bring extensive experience both in the channel and working with Microsoft resellers. That led to creating the CSP Growth Engine.
“The Onyx CSP Growth Engine platform is more than a tool,” Dusett said. “Think of it more like it's a commercial operating system. First, we built a really rich knowledge base, partnering with Microsoft to build the knowledge base of all knowledge bases of the Microsoft business. We wrapped an AI layer around it so that we could surface it as needed. And then we started to build what we call hubs on top of that foundation. Those hubs represent use cases. It's the ability for an MSP to do assessments or support their customers or to align Microsoft funding to growth opportunities inside their existing customers. And our final layer is that we then wrapped a services expertise layer around that so that we actually are their coaching partners, MSPs on scaling their business.”
He said the result is that MSPs can complete assessments faster, leading to about 30% more profitability inside deals. “We built what we all wish that we had had, which is the ability to have deal construct, licensing expertise, commercial guidance, all of that, without having to scale big teams,” Dusett said. “What led me here was a deep background in the partner channel and an understanding of the vendor side of the business.”
John Dusett
Dusett pointed to a golden opportunity Microsoft gave MSPs by pushing customers to CSP.
“Microsoft added this massive tailwind to all of it when they really came through on this promise of CSP as being their hero technology, which is the language Microsoft uses,” he said. “That meant tens of thousands of customers, mid-market and enterprise customers, were going to be moving to CSP. And the reason I think of this as tectonic is that any customer over maybe 500 seats or a million dollars a year in spend for years has been told to choose from one of a couple of partners, literally maybe a half a dozen partners. When Microsoft really started to say all of those mid-market and enterprise customers had to move to CSP, that means the customer now has thousands of partners to choose from. The market was shifting billions of dollars of business towards partners.”
He said MSPs are “perfectly positioned” to win those tens of thousands of customers looking for new partners.
“This is their moment,” Dusett said of MSPs. “This is their moment because the most important technologies that customers are looking at today have a complexity level that you can only unlock the value through the services that MSPs provide. And what I mean by that is you can't really get to the business outcomes that AI promises. You can't get there on a technology only play. It is technology plus the services.”
There’s much more in the video at the top of the page.