Every profession has a standard by which its members are judged. Recently, I even saw a bumper sticker for professional door installers; who knew they had a standard for their industry but I guess they do. As the N-Able partner community gathers in Arizona this week, arguably one of the oldest MSP gatherings in the channel, it has prompted me to ask, yet again, whether break/fix can and should be considered a legitimate IT standard.
When the first N-Able partner summit took place all those years ago, the migration to managed services by VARs was still occurring. N-Able and a few other organizations were just starting to really make a dent in convincing VARs that their old way of doing things was over. We still have work to do in this regard but we are making really strong progress. Today, when I look at the landscape of our profession I think we can safely say that the migration still is taking place, but that as a best practice is concerned, break/fix is no longer an acceptable standard for IT management.
The model of break/fix, as everyone knows, was useful at the time. Tools, knowledge, people, and other resources just did not exist back then to adequately diagnosis and proactively manage end user environments. Today, there is almost no excuse for MSPs to do this work. The tools are affordable, they work, there is plenty of public knowledge and awareness of the virtues and benefits of managed services, and for end users there is almost a desperate rush to embrace managed services as a business model for preserving cash flow and whole host of other reasons. Furthermore, with cloud now taking the world by storm, end users are fully aware that managed services and cloud computing are now relevant, practical, and mainstream.
I'm sure there are still IT companies and end users who are still doing things the old way. In many cases, it may be the fault of the end user who does not want to change. But, as with all things, time changes everything and it is a matter of time before break/fix completely goes away.
