The movement of more and more business applications and IT infrastructure to the cloud is changing the world for managed service providers (MSPs).

Historically, these channel players and system integrators were the trusted advisors who understood everything there was to know about their customers: their data center environment, their portfolio of services, the requirements of their applications, the level of service and compliance, and more.

Their customers would come to them and say, “I need a server consolidation project,” or ask, “What platform should I use for my consolidation project?” And in response, the resellers/advisors were happy to match their customers to the technology that met their needs. They knew what their customers were running and what the environment should look like in order to perform efficiently and for the least cost on a per-application basis.

But the cloud is disrupting this relationship and changing how MSPs do business. To move their customers to the cloud, resellers are challenged to learn the intricacies of various cloud services and how to manage these offerings.  They now need to offer customers a complete IT solution while, in parallel, establishing and maintaining relations with multiple cloud services including private, public and hybrid cloud providers to provision workloads appropriately.

Developing these new relationships with multiple cloud providers can be jarring for MSPs as they pivot to interface with a market composed of bigger organizations and they are compelled to adjust to a new price structure, with frequently lower margins. They are fast realizing that in order to participate in delivering cloud services they need a way to manage relationships with both their traditional customers and with cloud service providers.

“The hybrid cloud has arrived and offers a myriad of benefits to organizations, but it comes with a new set of challenges caused by complexity and lack of integration and visibility across different cloud services,” Forrester Research said in a recent report. “IT decision makers are recognizing the need for a cloud management solution that provides monitoring, governance and control, and visibility into security and performance, and integrates a wide range of cloud solutions through a unified portal.”

The Cloud Broker Emerges

These MSPs are emerging as cloud brokers, acting as middlemen to match buyer and seller based on particular needs and requirements, with considerations including price, service level, or compliance.

In fact, acting as the broker facilitating cloud services between their customer/user and cloud infrastructure service providers makes MSPs more valuable than ever.

“This may seem obvious, but the truth is that AWS, Google, Microsoft and other leading IaaS providers are not equipped to offer the lifecycle of support services to meet their customers' end-to-end implementation and management needs. Instead, they have designed their IaaS offerings to be highly standardized, and structured their services to be delivered in an automated fashion,” Analyst Jeff Kaplan recently wrote. “Although their IaaS solutions can be configured to meet the specific needs of a particular customer, properly configuring them requires specialized skills that the service providers are not incented to support.