The Rise of the Outcome-Based MSP and Why They Are Winning
As customer expectations shift from service delivery to measurable business impact, a new breed of MSP is emerging — the Outcome‑Based MSP. This panel brings together senior leaders from across the channel who will break down how the outcome based model is reshaping the MSP landscape sharing first hand insight.
Exploring how MSPs are moving beyond traditional SLAs and ticket volumes to deliver outcomes that directly support their customers’ strategic objectives. They’ll discuss the catalysts behind this shift, the operational and cultural changes required to support it, and why those who embrace outcome‑led delivery are seeing stronger margins, deeper customer loyalty, and long‑term differentiation in an increasingly competitive market.
Attendees will gain practical perspectives on how to define, package, and measure outcomes; how to align internal teams behind this new approach; and how forward‑thinking MSPs are already using this model to win new business and elevate their position as trusted strategic partners.
The Future of MSP M&A: What Buyers Want and What Owners Need to Know
Most MSP owners will only go through a sale, acquisition or investment process once, yet the decisions that shape business value are often made years before a deal ever takes place.
This panel brings together MSP owners who have successfully navigated acquisitions, investment or exit events, alongside advisors and industry experts, for an open discussion on what it really takes to build a valuable and attractive MSP business.
The conversation will explore the factors that buyers and investors scrutinise most closely, including recurring revenue quality, client concentration, contract maturity, operational maturity, profitability and leadership structure. Panellists will discuss the metrics that influence valuation, from net revenue retention (NRR) and revenue per employee to gross margin performance and reducing key-person dependency.
Attendees will also gain practical insights into what "exit readiness" really means, including financial discipline, process maturity, leadership development and creating a business that can scale beyond its founder.
Whether you're considering an acquisition, planning for future growth, or simply looking to build a stronger MSP, this session will provide practical perspectives from across the MSP and advisory community.
**Key takeaways:**
The factors that most influence MSP valuations and buyer interest
Common pitfalls that reduce value or delay transactions
Practical steps MSP owners can take today to build a more valuable and resilient business
How Not to fail with ITIL again? Reverse the order!
Most IT organizations adopt ITIL with the intention of creating customer value. Yet many become trapped in governance, complexity, process overhead, and organizational immaturity. As a result, ITIL often fails to deliver the value it promises.
The hard lesson is this:
ITIL does not fail because the framework is wrong.
ITIL fails because organizations implement solutions that are too complex for practitioners to apply and too difficult for leaders to manage.
Why ITIL Still Fails
1. TIL describes an ideal model—not an operational solution.
ITIL provides a comprehensive, well-documented, and valuable reference framework. However, many organizations struggle to translate its guidance into operational practices that are simple, executable, and sustainable.
2. The gap between consultants and operations is too large.
Transformation programs are often designed by people who are too far removed from those responsible for delivering and supporting services.
3. Process and practice adoption becomes the objective.
Organizations begin measuring framework compliance instead of operational performance and customer value.
4. Practitioners are sent on a "mission impossible."
Teams are expected to execute practices that are overly complex, insufficiently supported, or disconnected from operational reality.
5. Organizational change is underestimated.
Leaders expect practitioners to change their behavior without changing the organizational system in which they work.
In short:
We organize what should be done instead of what can be done.
Despite many valuable improvements, ITIL 5 still does not fundamentally solve this challenge.
The Solution: Reverse the Order
Organizations that truly want to benefit from ITIL and other valuable frameworks need a different, results-oriented implementation approach. An approach in which people, operational reality, and both realized and perceived customer value are the starting point as well as the ultimate outcome.
Instead of trying to make the organization fit the framework, we should build organizational change on the foundation of operational reality.
As I often say:
"An IT organization is as good as it behaves—not as it is designed or managed."
In This Presentation
Drawing on more than three decades of experience in data-driven, results-oriented organizational transformation, I will explain:
- Why organizations struggle to implement ITIL successfully.
- Where transformation initiatives typically fail.
- How Reversed Service Management (RSM) provides a practical implementation approach.
- Why People First is not a slogan, but a prerequisite for sustainable business improvement.
Two principles underpin this approach:
- Organizational debt precedes technical debt.
- Operational reality precedes successful transformation.
Three Key Takeaways
- Value is created only at the operational level—when users create value by applying services delivered by practitioners.
- Organizational debt precedes technical debt. The digital system is rarely the cause
- Don't organize what should be done; organize what people are actually capable of doing, and grow from there.
Bridging ITSM and Engineering Teams towards Coordinated AI Adoption
With organisations researching or piloting AI possibilities, the majority of ITSM professionals (62%) still find the AI integration difficult (SDI, 2024). Emotional resistance and coordination gaps are among the challenges. Other roles within the organisations are facing similar challenges. Most notably, the engineering teams and their managers, who have had to navigate the uncertainties in their work and professional identity.
When Matej (Engineering Manager) and Irene (Mental Fitness Coach) met during a conference last year, their passion for mentoring developed into a collaborative journey centered around this complex challenge. Seeing the rollercoasters of emotions through the AI adoption process in his department, Matej with mentoring from Irene, delivered a series of Hopes & Fears workshops with his teams and peers. We discovered a powerful finding that helped reframe the resistance: engineers are grieving the craft they built their careers on, what initially seemed like resistance was an identity crisis. In this dialogue-style talk, we unpack what happened next from both sides of engineering and mental fitness:
- How recognising the roots of their hopes and fears gave the team a shared language.
- How good mentoring from the leader helped people move from fear to action.
- How engineers redefined themselves, as problem solvers, AI orchestrators and champions.
By presenting this case study, we aim to build bridges between servicedesk/ITSM professionals and engineers. At the heart of the AI adoption challenge is the empowerment of the humans in working together as partners and collaborators. We hope to engage in clarifying discussion and encourage cross-team collaboration towards coordinated AI strategies, boosting adoption, and contributing to building resilient organisations.
Turning Threat Intelligence into Action: How MSPs Can Stay Ahead of Attackers
Even with so many threat intelligence available, many institutions still struggle to operationalize that intelligence beyond briefings and indicator feeds.
Modern attackers operate with discipline: they share intelligence, automate techniques and continuously test their tradecrafts. Defenders, however, rarely share procedural threat intelligence. They silo purple teaming, detection engineering, and threat hunting into disconnected activities.
This talk introduces a practical framework for integrating:
Cyber Threat Intelligence as structured, actionable input and actually focused on adversary behaviour, rather than generalized tactics and techniques
Continuous Purple Teaming as validation and focused on threat-informed simulation attacks which are actually relevant to you.
Detection & Response as Code as the operational backbone. No more reports and waiting several weeks for implementation. Immediate detection-as-code ready to implement in your environment. And how relevant is a detection rule without a response rule?
Threat Hunting to proactively search for intelligence-aligned behaviours or hypothesis-driven hunts.
We will explore how intelligence on sector-specific threats like ransomware groups, payment fraud actors, supply-chain compromises and state-sponsored actors can be translated into detection hypotheses, adversary simulations, and codified detection logic that is version-controlled, testable, and continuously validated.
If you don’t own adoption, you don’t own the customer
MSPs love to talk about security, cloud and AI. But if customers do not actually use what you implement, your value stays invisible. In this session, Carina challenges MSPs to rethink adoption, not as a soft add-on, but as a strategic lever for customer loyalty, differentiation and business growth. Because when you ignore adoption, you leave a gap in your customer relationship and someone else will fill it. The real question is not whether adoption matters. The real question is: who owns it?
From Pricing to Profit: Building MSP Offers That Convert
During this session, I’ll share the classic mistakes in MSP offers and what to do instead to ease the sales process, increase conversion rate and average deal size thanks to higher prices or better cross-sell/upsell.
I’ll also share the right add-ons strategies and how to upgrade existing customers to an upper package.
Less Friction, Fewer Tickets — A Better Service Desk Starts Upstream
Most service desks see only the tip of the iceberg. Every ticket is a moment a user decided the problem was worth reporting. And behind every reported problem sits a much larger volume of unreported friction: the workarounds, the quiet ten-minute losses, the frustrations vented to a colleague but never logged. This invisible layer is where digital experience is actually shaped, day to day, and where service desk demand is silently generated.
ITIL5 has formally recognised Experience Management as a discipline in its own right. But naming a practice and doing it are very different things, and Experience Management starts at a point most IT organisations are not yet equipped for: knowing where the friction actually sits. That requires more than excellent ticket registration; it requires a deliberate measurement discipline for the problems users never report.
This session offers the practical foundation: a model that connects friction measurement, user adoption, and service desk demand into one picture, and that ITSM leaders and MSP owners can use to intervene where the leverage is greatest. Drawing on patterns across Dutch enterprises, it offers a vocabulary, a method, and a business case for working upstream rather than scaling support.
This is not a tools session. It is about turning a framework ITIL has just named into something that lives in your service desk on Monday morning: starting with the friction you can't yet see.