In order to survive, managed service providers must distinguish themselves in innovative and unique ways, offering their customers the services which they need, often before they even know they need them. With so many different services now moving to a cloud model, managed service providers have a wide range of different services which they can offer to customers, either as a reseller or partner, or simply the administrative agent for the customer’s service. While there are many different services to choose from, these are the top 7 services that we believe MSPs should consider.

Email

Whether you opt for basic IMAP/SMTP services, or something more feature rich like Office 365, managing email services for SMBs is a natural start. These can be costly in the small scale, require specialized knowledge, and are mission critical; but become much more affordable at scale. Office 365 has a number of features that are designed with managed service providers in mind.

Collaboration

Intranet portals and instant messaging are two more components of Office 365 but are also available from other cloud based services including Google Apps. Whichever platform you choose (and who says you cannot offer both?) collaboration is another key service customers want now.

Web hosting

Everyone has a website these days, but how many of them are functional? Offer web hosting that includes professional web design services, interactive features like social media, and make sure you offer a shopping cart function so your customers can do more than just advertise online.

VoIP

The costs to setup a VoIP infrastructure are astronomical, but to resell services for one of the major players is not. MSPs can partner with a major provider and resell branded services without any of the upfront investments. VoIP is one of those services that for most customers become a very long term commitment, and that means recurring revenue for years to come.

Monitoring

Another service that everyone needs but no one really does well without dedicated resources, outsourced monitoring can take advantage of one of the many cloud based solutions to easily offer monitoring/alerting/reporting capabilities to your customers which can lead to upsell opportunities for management and remediation services.

IT Help Desk/Support

Everyone needs a help desk, but no SMB can afford a full time employee to provide support, and they seldom need that. Outsourced IT help desk services are another way to establish recurring revenue, can often involve retainers, and can lead to other opportunities. Many MSPs started in this business providing IT help desk services, and it’s a well that won’t run dry anytime soon.

IdM/AAA

Take the long view and trust me on this on…Identity Management services are going to be huge in the next couple of years. Whether you host an OpenLDAP infrastructure or a full Active Directory, providing the authentication and authorization services for SMBs, including provisioning their users, will become one of the next big things, and will position you to resell many other services that will hit it big in the next three to five years.

If you are an MSP wondering how you can grow your service catalog, these are the top seven services we think you should focus on.