Episode 101: Scaling Smarter: How MSPs Can Leverage AI, Security, and Strategic Partnerships

Jorn Wittendorp04/24/2025

Managed service providers (MSPs) are being asked to do more. These expectations extend to managing increasingly complex digital environments, ensuring cybersecurity, and staying ahead of AI adoption while serving as strategic advisors to their customers. On the other hand, they’re still expected to run lean, be cost-efficient, and deliver consistently excellent service. Meeting these competing demands calls for a new kind of agility that balances technical mastery with strategic foresight.

In a recent #shifthappens episode, AvePoint’s Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Mario Carvajal, and Ydentic Founder and CEO, Jorn Wittendorp, share how their partnership grew from a shared purpose: helping MSPs scale smarter. Their conversation offers practical insight into how the right mix of technology, security, and aligned vision can help MSPs do more to meet growing customer expectations.

Scaling Alone Is Hard, Scaling Together Is Smarter

Jorn’s long-term goal is to help MSPs work more efficiently. After years in the field, he saw how much time is lost to manual tasks like provisioning users and managing tickets. In response, he built Ydentic, a multi-tenant software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that automates and standardizes day-to-day IT operations, freeing teams to focus on more strategic work.

Building a product is one thing. Scaling it across regions, with the right infrastructure and go-to-market support, is an entirely different challenge.

This is where AvePoint enters the picture. From their first conversations, Jorn’s automation-first philosophy aligns naturally with the self-service and workflow automation capabilities of the AvePoint Elements platform. Both teams focus on eliminating operational friction, so MSPs can spend less time on repetitive work and more time delivering outcomes.

Crucially, AvePoint provides the global reach Ydentic needs. In addition, Mario highlights that AvePoint’s established sales, pre-sales, and support teams across Europe and North America will play a key role in accelerating expansion and ensuring customer success.

What begins as complementary technology evolves into a shared vision for identity governance, security automation, and scalable service delivery. This acquisition goes beyond global growth; it’s building a more robust platform to achieve the common goal.

What MSPs Need Right Now

The challenges facing MSPs today are complex, but they’re also surprisingly common. Most MSPs are asking the same questions:

• How do we grow without burning out our team?
• How do we differentiate ourselves in a crowded market?
• How can we offer more value without adding more overhead?

The AvePoint-Ydentic integration addresses these challenges across three key dimensions:

1. More Simplified Operations: Modern MSPs need to reduce complexity, not add to it. Combining automation and self-service helps providers eliminate manual tasks, reduce errors, and standardize service delivery while maintaining control over identity, configuration, and compliance.
2. Stronger Security Posture: With the surge in AI and cloud-based services, the risks are higher than ever. Security posture should be reinforced by making identity and access management central to service delivery. Automated controls, policy enforcement, and proactive alerts help MSPs reduce risk and stay ahead of evolving compliance demands.
3. Improved Insight and Oversight: Clients are increasingly looking for data-driven recommendations and proactive guidance. For MSPs, this means having the ability to extract and act on insights across environments, whether identifying inefficient license usage, surfacing AI readiness gaps, or highlighting data exposure risks.

Empowering MSPs with AI and Data Management

MSPs today face a taller order: managing multi-cloud environments, ensuring compliance, and harnessing AI to deliver strategic value, all while keeping operations lean. A big hurdle is data. AI tools need clean, secure data to work effectively. Messy or exposed data leads to unreliable AI results, which can lead to wasted time and lost trust.

Drawing from their partnership, Jorn and Mario emphasize tools that cut through these challenges. The AvePoint Elements platform, enhanced with Ydentic’s AI-driven automation, helps MSPs simplify multi-cloud management and strengthen security with automated identity controls and compliance checks. It frees MSPs from manual work, letting them focus on guiding clients with clear, data-backed insights. This approach keeps MSPs agile and prepared to address their customers’ needs.

Turning Insight into Action: Key Areas to Prioritize

Turning insights into action starts with knowing where to focus. Jorn and Mario highlight five key actions for MSPs to make immediate, meaningful improvements:

• Use AI to Streamline Your Operations: Automate routine tasks to reduce errors and free up resources for more complex client needs.
• Automate Security to Stay Ahead: Proactively protect systems by embedding security automation into everyday processes. This action builds resilience as threats evolve.
• Centralize Multi-Cloud for Greater Agility: Unify management across cloud platforms to reduce complexity, improve efficiency, and stay responsive to client demands.
• Standardize with Automation for Scalable Growth: Eliminate manual bottlenecks, improve reporting, and enable faster, more sustainable expansion.
• Partner Smart for Greater Impact: Collaborate with trusted solution providers to integrate AI, strengthen security, and streamline multi-cloud environments.

Strategic Growth Beyond Tools

The AvePoint acquisition of Ydentic illustrates that having the right tools is only part of the equation. What sets successful MSPs apart is knowing how to apply those tools strategically and recognizing when a partnership can create meaningful momentum. It’s not about relying on others to succeed, but about being intentional: understanding your goals, knowing your strengths, and deciding when collaboration adds real value.

As Jorn puts it, “Be very clear about your vision of what you want to do in the future. This (early discussion) is the moment to share that.” Growth doesn’t come from technology alone; it also stems from clarity, preparation, and purpose. When vision and values align, MSPs are better positioned to adapt, lead, and deliver impact.

Episode Resources

• Ydentic Acquisition Press Release
• eBook: Seven Steps for MSPs to Build Recurring Revenue Streams with Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Jorn Wittendorp on LinkedIn
• Dux Raymond Sy on LinkedIn
• Mario Carvajal on LinkedIn
• Ydentic website