Photo: Shield Technology CEO Jim Siders (center) speaks with Channel Partners' Robert DeMarzo (left) and Dave Raffo (right).
MSP newcomer Shield Technology Partners generated a lot of news over the past year.
Last June, Thrive Holdings invested $100 million into Shield as a war chest to acquire MSPs. OpenAI has taken an equity stake in Thrive Holdings, and it supplies engineering talent to Shield to build and deploy AI products for its MSPs’ customers.
Shield then hired Palantir CIO Jim Siders as its CEO in December to guide the expansion of its portfolio, which now includes 13 MSPs.
In an opening-day 2026 Channel Partners Conference/MSP Summit keynote interview Monday, Siders outlined Shield’s business strategy and use of AI in its portfolio companies.
“I want to be really clear — this is not a traditional roll-up, and it's not a traditional tech company, though it has aspects of both,” Siders said. “The mission of Shield is ultimately to create amazing outcomes for our enterprise customers. It's not to sell anything for its own sake — it's to create phenomenal outcomes. And as we do that well, it benefits us, too. It's good business.
“So we're looking for businesses that are unique — companies that have been doing something excellent and specialized for the last 20 or 30 years. We're looking for high-talent organizations, generally with very long-tenured owners and employees — people who are still fired up, who really want to engage with what's coming next. This isn't about going to the golf course. It's about getting up in the morning excited for this next generation of technology.”
Describing his acquisition strategy, Siders said he is looking for “diversity of size and focus,” meaning a mixture of small and large MSPs and companies with various types of services.
“Right now with the war chest, we're focused on acquiring the best MSPs in America — building the technical and organizational foundation,” he said.
Jim Siders
Shield will add to the technical foundation through AI model pioneer OpenAI. Siders said OpenAI’s involvement is more than just financial.
“OpenAI, it's not just an investment relationship,” Siders said. “It's an engineering relationship. We have OpenAI engineers who work with us, who go with us to our portfolio companies, who go to our customers. They're learning from the process. We're getting the benefit of their product knowledge and development talent.”
Selling and implementing AI also requires educating customers as well as the MSPs doing the selling. Siders said that is a big part of Shield’s strategy as well.
“AI is only as good as our imagination,” he said. “The thing somebody's trying to sell us — and the thing we're trying to generate value with — is really our imagination and our lived experience as an industry. So really educating people about how to approach whatever the next new technology is, with their own great ideas, is probably the most high-value and fun work we get to do.
“AI is democratizing quality for a lot of organizations. There are people who work in all kinds of different roles at our customers' companies — people who live the day-to-day operational experience in ways that their technology purchasers don't fully understand. If we can bring them something that really saves time, really helps their day-to-day, that creates a lot of opportunity for everyone. If we do it right, everybody benefits.”