The techpartner.news podcast, episode 2: Interactive CEO’s simple but challenging advice for MSP success

Global scale IT services companies are expanding their reach to smaller customers, causing a squeeze on mid-market providers.

Alexandra Coates has more than 20 years in the industry under her belt, including six years in the C-suite at Datacom Australia and now as chief executive of Interactive, one of Australia’s oldest and largest IT services companies.

On the latest episode of the techpartner.news podcast, Coates said one of the biggest challenges facing the industry is the level of competition in the mid-market space.

“You've got global MSPs that are moving from the enterprise down into the mid-market stack, and you've got organisations just like Interactive whose kind of breeding ground is mid-market and so it's squeezing the competitive middle," she said.

To stand out and continue to win, Coates said, service providers should focus their efforts in two areas: differentiation and cooperation.

When asked how MSPs can differentiate themselves in such a competitive market, Coates replied that the first step is to be clear about their speciality.

“ You will not be everything to all people – it is impossible …  (It’s about) really thinking through and deliberating what your superpower is as a company and where that superpower meets unmet need in either customers or industry segments," she told techpartner.news.

"That’s a deliberate part of strategy planning and companies need to do that far, far more deeply than they have before.”

Australian companies should also lean on their localness as a key selling point.

“ Geopolitical uncertainty, massively heightened Australian regulations. SOCI, APRA, CPS 230. All of those things mean that many customers need a company that deeply understands the critical infrastructure and the deep regulatory environment of our country.”

Coates’ call for greater industry cooperation is part of a growing chorus, and a running theme through the first season of the techpartner.news podcast.

Her perspective is that service providers can work with each other to develop and build off each other’s solutions.

“ The job of us working collectively together is to take the most ambitious use cases that there are in certain industries and to try and solve those together and then incrementally build on that," she said.

To realise this goal, it doesn’t take any kind of special infrastructure or organisation, just a “mindset shift”.

“It is as simple as taking a use case or a challenge out in a customer or an industry, and getting together and talking about it.”

Looking ahead, Coates said that she hopes to see more of this kind of collaboration amongst local service providers in the future, but also, greater diversity and inclusivity across the industry. 

“ It is an amazing industry to be in and, we should not stop until it's a place where everyone wants to be. It's a place where everyone can do whatever dance they want to pull on the dance floor, they can do it because we respect it and we've built an inclusive dance floor where people can flourish.”