And how emma empowers providers to scale, differentiate, and grow.
The managed hosting market is booming, set to hit $355.2 billion by 2030. But the rules of the industry are changing fast. No one’s hiring an MSP (Managed Service Provider) just to “keep the lights on” anymore. Companies want long-term, strategic partners who can fuel aggressive growth, scale operations globally, deliver unmatched performance, and manage complex compliance, without bloating their IT teams and budgets.
For MSPs, it’s time to stop selling infrastructure alone and start selling strategy. Over the next decade, success will demand you wear many hats – hosting vendor, strategic partner, problem-solver, and trusted advisor – all at once.
Here’s how to do it, and how the right stack and approach to cloud management can make it possible:
Keeping servers running is now the bare minimum. As an MSP, you need to understand your client’s workloads, infrastructure needs, compliance obligations, performance goals, and support preferences and translate them into actual solutions. To do this, you need to move from transactional service delivery to proactive engagement.
To begin with, you need structured onboarding workflows and discovery blueprints that make it simple to assess each client’s infrastructure and compliance needs from the start. From there, you need a provisioning platform that enables you to deploy custom reference architectures based on industry standards and tailored to client-specific SLAs, workloads, and budgets.
Whether your clients need multi-cloud diversity or hybrid cloud support, you must be able to consistently orchestrate environments across hyperscalers, sovereign clouds, and private infrastructure through a single pane of glass.
When you can provision infrastructure anywhere and fine-tune every detail to your client’s exact infrastructure needs, you essentially turn every engagement into a client-focused, consultative partnership, building trust and retention from day one.
MSPs with multi-national clients or those operating under regional compliance rules have a tightrope to tread – balancing sovereignty with performance and infrastructure requirements. In other words, you must offer the right infrastructure in the right location, with minimal latency and complete compliance.
To build that global reach, you must be able to support regional and niche providers in addition to hyperscalers. You also need a robust multi-cloud networking backbone to connect all the distributed workloads and data stores.
Automation is the only way you can enforce regional restrictions on workload placement centrally and consistently across all client environments you manage. You should have a unified cloud control plane with multi-tenant views to orchestrate and manage countless customers with diverse environments in real time, without manual overhead.
Cloud costs are everyone’s problem, and your clients are probably feeling the pressure, too. They need transparency, predictable pricing, and the ability to scale without overprovisioning or underprovisioning. Fortunately, you now have the tools, insights, and analytics to predict exactly the right amount of resources needed and rightsize to perfection.
However, accurate forecasting requires real-time data. That means live consumption metrics across all clouds, real-time pricing from multiple providers, and a consolidated view of both current costs and remaining budget. With that visibility, you enable your clients to make proactive adjustments before costs cross thresholds.
In addition, if you can use the granular pricing and consumption data to set up modular billing and monitor your profit margin on each client account, it can help you offer flexible, tailored pricing for your clients while ensuring your own profitability.
Recent cloud outages, price hikes, and licensing changes have exposed the risks of overreliance on a single cloud vendor. Broadcom’s handling of VMware partners is a lesson the entire industry should heed. Any disruption to services and budget overruns ultimately erode customer trust and your bottom line.
Your clients expect you to mitigate such disruptions and design infrastructure strategies with resilience at the core. It requires expanding your portfolio and distributing services across multiple providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, OpenStack, and sovereign clouds), with dynamic load balancing and automated failover to keep operations smooth.
To achieve this level of resilience, you need not only multi-cloud-ready, vendor-agnostic tooling, but also the support of a reliable networking backbone for constructing and connecting low-latency, high-availability environments that span jurisdictions.
As your clients become cloud-mature, uptime and SLA compliance become the baseline, and they come to expect it anyway. What truly differentiates your services is the advisory value, cost efficiency, and clarity you bring as a long-term strategic partner. That’s what will ultimately make you indispensable.
Achieving this requires top-tier observability tools and AI-powered anomaly detection to identify and resolve issues before clients even notice them. You’ll also need to provide live dashboards showcasing performance, cost savings, and actionable recommendations. These capabilities are essential as they allow you to prove your value, scale your service portfolio beyond infrastructure provisioning, improve NPS, and grow recurring revenue without adding operational complexity.
To succeed in tomorrow’s managed hosting market, you must do more as an MSP than keep the lights on. You need to be a cloud advisor, cost optimizer, and compliance enabler. You must also operate globally, support locally, and deliver value that evolves with your customers.
That’s where emma comes in – it gives managed service and hosting providers the tools to do exactly that – today. It’s a modern, multi-cloud, multi-tenant management platform that enables MSPs to deliver smarter, more agile, and more profitable cloud services, without the complexity of managing diverse client environments manually.
By integrating cost management, compliance automation, multi-cloud orchestration, and scalable service delivery into one platform, emma enables you to:
For more on our MSP offering and how emma is helping service providers become indispensable, read our solution brief: emma for MSPs.
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)
