An MSP - a managed service provider - is a pillar of the IT world, providing support and services to businesses of all sizes. This may be because your company is not large enough to justify having your own internal IT team, or it may be because the MSP brings in skills and strengths you don’t have in-house but need for a specific project. There can be many reasons.

However, it won't be a surprise to those in the industry that not everybody loves their MSP. The promises of providing help when needed suddenly become big charges if you ask for help on a weekend, at night, or even simply too many times in a month. Or the promises of ensuring uptime on your critical infrastructure are conditional on buying certain software or hardware. Or you find yourself endlessly encountering the same problem only to be told each time, “reboot your PC” without identifying the root, recurring issue.

If you've found your MSP relationship is a bit like a “bad romance,” in the words of Versent customer engagement director Stafia Giannakis, then you need to know there are alternatives.

In fact, Giannakis says many MSPs have a set-and-forget approach, or set tight boundaries around precisely what they will do. However, “customers want to deal with people who are about them,” she says.

The traditional MSP service model hasn’t delivered on the evolution of platforms - across cloud, data, and security - and results in a lot of wasted opportunities for customers, who simply are not receiving value, Giannakis says.

Additionally, Giannakis refers to “ticket tennis” - a large volume of incidents shift from one group to another, even back to the customer, without ultimately bringing a result. This problem is underpinned by static contracts that “don’t breathe in and out with the customer’s heartbeat,” she says.

It's easy to point out flaws. After all, this writer himself has been exasperated by MSPs who let mail servers run out of disk space, or who failed to resolve underlying problems and only treat the symptoms time and time again. In each case it appeared the MSP rated its ticketing system on such criteria as “how quickly the ticket was allocated to a team member” - but not how swiftly it was resolved, only how rapidly it was allocated. Or, the ticket was rated on how quickly it was closed which inevitably led to the bandaid approaches and not long-term problem solving. And certainly none of this leads to innovation, merely responding to tasks.

So what’s Versent doing differently then? “We take the opposite approach,” Giannakis says. “We call it ‘modern run’, not ‘managed services’ and we focus on evolution, relentless automation, and sending multi-disciplined squads to customer sites instead of having a single focus.”

"We attack problems that frustrate companies,” she says. In fact, not only attack but “attack with anger. This drives tickets down right away. “One of the things we do is look at ticket queues and smash it down to the absolute minimum.”

Next, Versent focuses on the customer ambitions, and in this, keeps the customer’s platforms fresh allowing the customer themselves to continue to innovate.

In a nutshell, Giannakis says, “the Versent secret sauce is to focus on improvements first, bring multi-disciplined teams to the customer, keep themselves and the customer up-to-date with tech, and to give the customer the space and time to focus on what matters to them.”

This differs from the traditional MSP model that might be described as very transactional, SLA-bound, and with typical contracts.

Versent is "definitely about respectful relationships,” Giannakis says. “We educate the customer respectfully along the way, to leave them in a better way than we found them.”

The proof is in the pudding, with Versent finding its approach is a huge differentiator, with hugely positive reactions and feedback from customers. The company isn’t small either; it’s grown to more than 600 staff around Australia.

Versent is so focused on doing right by the customer that it has an internal lingo where something is not done until it’s “done done.”

"'Done done' is our way of talking about our completeness of work,” Giannakis says. “It’s not about simply meeting a contract obligation but about what success means for the customer.”

"'Done done' is purposeful, and a complete end-to-end result. It’s not simply about an SLA dashboard,” she says.

You might worry service like this can break the bank. Fortunately, that’s not so. The business offers different flexible, pricing options. These start with some obvious metrics - “most customers want some in terms of uptime and recovery of platforms,” Giannakis says, but also includes a portion of continuous evolution. The focus here is “definitely not ticket-based” but on creating multi-disciplined pods, understanding where the customer is going, and running sprints to bring value to the customer in an agile fashion.

"I call it commercial empathy,” she says. “We look after the customer’s money and give back more than they bargained for.”

"Our services span multiple industries, but we have deep domain knowledge, especially across banking and finance, and increasingly in state Government,” Giannakis says. “We see tech problems in those environments and apply in a horizontal fashion, taking what we have from one domain to solve other customers’ challenges.”

So what's your MSP relationship like?

“If there are people today caught in a bad romance or disillusioned with the speed in which their traditional managed service is working, and that MSP is not pursuing being better every day, now is the time to look at an alternative,” Giannakis says.

In fact, you can speak to her directly. “I’m happy to take the initial call and talk about your interests and align it with the right part of the company,” she says. “I’m part of the modern run organisation. We're all about continuous evolution, operational stability, and scaling with the customer through agile delivery and modern processes.”

“We want to leave our customers in much better shape, with better process maturation, better technology, and staying fresh. We do in a way that makes it easy to engage with us, and that’s fun also.”

“Versent was born in the cloud and has always been about challenging traditional behaviours and standing out. We’ve always adopted modern ways of working.”

During my conversation, I couldn’t help but note that Giannakis speaks so enthusiastically and with infectious gusto about the delight and joy she gains from helping customers. “I’m proud to work here. It’s a bunch of talented people, we’re extremely passionate about tech and staying fresh and applying it in the right way for the customer. It’s an amazing place to be.”

"If you don't have passion for your own job, and for your customer’s success, you’re in the wrong job,” she says.