CEO Outlook 2025: 13 MSPs On What They Need Most From Vendors

The leaders of 13 MSPs, ranging from large national services providers to local IT experts, weigh in on what they need most from their vendor partners to successfully support business customers’ IT needs.

The life of an MSP is filled with back-and-forth conversations between customers, sales execs, and engineers as they work to tailor the right solution to meet clients’ needs from the massive variety of tools they have at their disposal.

While MSPs have the skills and experience to support their ability to design, sell, and deploy much needed hardware, software, and services, they also require support from the vendors who develop the technologies behind their solutions.

While the relationship an MSP has with its customers is the key to success, the relationships they have with their vendor partners is almost as critical. Good vendor support is important to keeping up with the latest technologies, integrating them as part of a wider solution, and supporting them once the job is done.

To best support their customers, MSPs have a number of things they need from their vendor partners. Flexibility, collaboration, tool consolidation, alignment with MSP activities, and even co-investment in new technologies are what MSPs told CRN would help improve the lives of vendors, MSPs, and customers.

Luis Armendaris, CEO of Doral, Fla.-based Gordon Lewis Group, said it best: True partnerships are critical.

“Listening to feedback from the channel and adapting products to meet real-world needs strengthens both the vendor-MSP relationship and the value delivered to clients,” Armendaris said. “Many vendors already excel at this, and continued collaboration will be key to tackling the challenges of a rapidly evolving industry. By simplifying, securing, and aligning with MSPs, vendors can enable us to focus on what we do best: delivering exceptional value to our clients.”

Read on for what some of the top MSP leaders had to say in CRN’s CEO Outlook 2025.

And of course, see the full CEO Outlook project for more thoughts from these and other tech CEOs.

Maryann Pagano, CEO

BlackHawk Data

The #1 thing we need from our vendor partners in 2025 is alignment on flexibility and co-innovation. We need partners who can:

• Develop solutions tailored to our customers' unique needs in underserved markets.
• Provide consumption-based pricing models that align with our OPEX-focused delivery.
• Offer robust technical support and training to ensure seamless deployment and optimization.
• Collaborate on new offerings, leveraging their R&D capabilities alongside our customer insights.

Luis Armendaris, CEO

Gordon Lewis Group

In 2025, one of the greatest challenges for MSPs is balancing rising personnel costs with the need to deliver exceptional service. Competing with large corporations for highly skilled technical talent is increasingly difficult, making it critical for vendors to create tools and solutions that are simpler to deploy and manage. By reducing the expertise required to operate their products, vendors can help MSPs remain competitive with smaller teams, allowing key personnel to oversee operations while the rest of the environment becomes easier to manage. This, combined with simplifying their products, ensuring adaptability, and fostering seamless integration with other tools, will empower MSPs to thrive in a rapidly evolving market.

Additionally, true partnerships are critical. Listening to feedback from the channel and adapting products to meet real-world needs strengthens both the vendor-MSP relationship and the value delivered to clients. Many vendors already excel at this, and continued collaboration will be key to tackling the challenges of a rapidly evolving industry. By simplifying, securing, and aligning with MSPs, vendors can enable us to focus on what we do best: delivering exceptional value to our clients.

Bob Cagnazzi, CEO

Presidio

We want our vendor partners to become more collaborative in promoting partner integrated solutions, which boils down to three key focus areas. First, combining the best of their technology offerings and the best of Presidio's design, deployment, and service capabilities for a more tailored and repeatable set of solutions. Second, take advantage of our creative consumption models, coupled with simplified partner programs that will allow us to address customer needs more dynamically and compete more effectively in a rapidly evolving marketplace. Finally, co-invest in enablement programs for our consultants, engineers, and architects to jointly deliver faster outcomes for our customers.

Asif Hasan, Co-Founder and President

Quantiphi

As someone who's been deeply involved in AI partnerships for over a decade now, and given our extensive track record of successful collaborations, what we're really looking for from our partners in 2025 is to deepen our already strong co-innovation momentum. We're fortunate to have early access to most innovations and launches from our key partners. For instance, we've been involved in numerous early access programs with Google Cloud, Nvidia and AWS, especially around Gen AI capabilities, which has allowed us to build cutting-edge solutions like our Baioniq platform. This early involvement has been crucial in helping us deliver transformational value to our customers. What we're looking for going forward is to further strengthen these strategic partnerships by:

• Expanding our joint solution development initiatives, where we continue to combine our deep implementation experience with our partners' latest technological innovations.
• Deepening our collaboration on specialized industry solutions, particularly in areas like healthcare and financial services where we've already built significant domain expertise.
• Further streamlining our access to critical resources like GPU capacity, which is essential for scaling our AI solutions.

The key for us is maintaining and building on the "early-mover advantage" we've built over the years. When our partners release new capabilities or features, we want to continue being among the first to understand, implement, and deliver value from these innovations to our customers.

Patrick O’Dell, Managing Partner

CPP Associates

We are looking for better end-user support from an operational standpoint (faster quotation, delivery, product announcements/updates, etc.) as well as better, more consistent break/fix support on their technical solutions. Part of this is better tool consolidation. We believe that partners like HPE, Palo Alto, MS and Fortinet who can consolidate five or more tools into one helps us reduce complexity for our clients and therefore increase efficiency for them and us.

Jonathan Lerner, President and CEO

InterVision

As organizations continue to accelerate their digital transformation journey, we will see more MSPs evolve into highly embedded strategic platform partners. MSPs are no longer confined to traditional IT maintenance, change, and support roles. By embracing and prioritizing cloud-native technologies alongside AI, ML, and advanced security solutions, MSPs empower their customers to innovate faster, reduce costs, and enhance the customer experience. They are bridging the gap between business and tech, providing valuable insights and using that to recommend opportunities for driving growth and building sustained competitive advantage in their market.

Rob Figliulo, CEO

SPR

In 2025, the No. 1 thing we need from our vendor partners is a commitment to collaboration and alignment. As the pace of technological change accelerates, it's critical that our partners work closely with us to ensure their offerings are adaptable, scalable, and forward-thinking. We value agility. The market is evolving rapidly, and our clients expect us to stay ahead of the curve. Vendor partners that can respond quickly to changing needs, prioritize co-innovation, and deliver reliable support will play an instrumental role in our mutual success.

Lori Williams, CEO

Caylent

Collaboration and alignment are paramount. We want our vendor partners to engage deeply with us in co-developing solutions that address market demands, support joint pipeline growth and enable seamless transitions from scoping to delivery. Strategic touchpoints, joint success planning and a commitment to innovation will be key. Working together with our top partners, AWS, Anthropic and NVIDIA, their support in providing advanced AI tools and resources will be crucial in enhancing our service offerings and delivering superior value to our clients.

Josh Dinneen, CEO

Blue Mantis

Co-invest with us. We are looking for our vendor partners to be part of our strategy, to invest with us and bolster our efforts to drive value to our clients. Our vendor and partner stacks are really solidified, and we are using them to drive market share together, but we must do so transparently. So together with those vendor partners, we are looking to set goals and to drive a programmatic approach to the partnerships because it will benefit everyone: our clients, our partners and Blue Mantis.

Jeff VonDeylen, CEO

Ensono

The most critical support we seek from our vendor partners is a deep alignment with our services and capabilities. We are one of the few providers with the expertise to seamlessly integrate mission-critical legacy systems with modern cloud environments backed by partner technologies. By working together, we can create a powerful synergy that not only benefits our clients but also strengthens our collective market position.

Martin Schroeter, Chairman and CEO

Kyndryl

Our customers want Kyndryl to show up with our ecosystem of partners as trusted advisors with the expertise, the technology and the track record to help them be resilient, modernize, adopt cloud and implement AI and GenAI. Our most successful partners will invest with us to build skills, forge strong customer relationships and integrate more capabilities into our Kyndryl Bridge platform. Together, we can drive growth and deliver exceptional value to our customers.

Irfan Khan, CEO and President

CloudSufi

In 2025, the No. 1 thing we want from our vendor partners is full alignment with CloudSufi's core values: empathy, boldness, passion, and integrity. These principles are not just words but the foundation of everything we do as a company, and we expect our partners to embody them in their collaboration with us. Additionally, we want our vendor ecosystem to align with our vision of creating a positive impact: "Every dollar we earn would contribute to building a safer, more sustainable world for the next generation." We expect our partners to support initiatives prioritizing ethical practices, sustainability, and innovation that benefit humanity. By fostering relationships with vendors and partners who share these values, we aim to drive transformative changes together, ensuring every project, solution, and dollar we generate contributes to a better, safer, and more equitable future. I want to say that: "AI is a powerful tool crafted by humanity, not a force greater than it. It’s true purpose is to amplify human potential, not overshadowing [the idea] that innovation serves humanity, not vice versa."

Kelly Ireland, Founder and CEO

CB Technologies

It's the same thing that we've always asked and wanted - reward those of your partners that invest in ensuring that they have the knowledge, experience and personnel to provide true value-add. We've always been told throughout the last decade (or two) that vendors were trying to figure out programs that would reward those who did exactly that. All have struggled to deliver anything close. We truly understand this isn't easy and has challenges, but it certainly would go a long way to helping the fact that few VARs can invest in becoming specialized considering there's little upside with vendors.