Managed service provider Inflection Point has grown quickly in recent years and has ambitions to continue that through the cutting edge with AI, but also traditional values of good customer service and building long-term relationships with clients.
For any managed service provider (MSP) around the UK, AI is one word that crops up in almost every conversation with customers today. The technology is rapidly developing and many businesses are looking to explore its potential.
For Southwest-based MSP Inflection Point, these conversations are relished, as the company has embraced AI and has a wealth of experience in its ranks.
“We work strategically in partnership with our customers to drive ambitious technology change,” explains Iain Godding, managing director of Inflection Point. “We major on AI automation and business process improvement along with cybersecurity and all the usual things that you would expect from an MSP.”
Inflection Point focuses on businesses with 50-300 staff, either with or without an internal IT function, providing standard MSP services, from outsourced IT to delivering internal technology projects, enhancing cybersecurity to digital transformation.
Where Inflection Point provides a point of difference is its expertise in AI and automation. “We’ve got software developers and AI and automation experts, and we lead with that for our customers,” Iain says. “If they can do more with less and be more efficient, then we’re really adding value in that MSP space.
“I’m acutely aware that AI is coming, and the day will come where there’s a Copilot agent on Windows devices that can do most of the stuff that technicians do at the moment. That sort of service desk element is going to reduce, which is where the consultative strategic vision, helping businesses drive forward, is important. And that’s where we’re pivoting to.
“Within the MSP space, there’s talk of MIPs, or managed intelligence providers, and the pivot that mid-market MSPs like Inflection Point are doing is driving in that direction. We’ve got a good position on that with the investments we’ve made in development and software.”
Building relationships
Iain says there is a mixed picture among clients when it comes to AI adoption currently.
“Some have used ChatGPT or Claude and they’re unimpressed, and closed the lid on AI,” he says. “But others have done more work, perhaps they’ve got AI doing elements of their marketing or finance and they get so far and then run out of talent internally and need somebody who can tie different systems together. As an MSP we are uniquely positioned with our clients in that we know how the telephony works, how the finance system works, how all the server infrastructure is put together, so when it comes to leveraging AI to do advanced workloads, we can quickly and easily pull all that together. We know where to point it and we can help unblock the projects that they’re running internally, or they can just give it to us and say, ‘give me the outcome, I want it to do X, Y, Z’.”
Iain adds that Inflection Point is also helping clients to see the benefits of AI beyond things like Copilot or transcribing meetings – something other MSPs may not do. He says this is down to the relationships that he likes to build with clients that go beyond being purely transactional and more to being trusted advisors.
A key part of this is how Inflection Point is structured. The company has a lean management structure, with Iain at the top, which means decisions can be made quickly. It also gives consistency for customers too, as they get to know the people they deal with over time.
“There’s no private investment, it’s one person at the top, and I can make the choices and changes,” explains Iain. “We can be very agile and come up with clever things for our customers quickly that some bigger MSPs or MSPs that are grouped together through private equity just can’t do. We’ve steadily grown because of driving that technical focus forward and partnering with our customers and listening to them.
“We have customers that have been with us a long time because we’re not transactional, it’s a relationship. We do the right thing. This is complicated stuff we do and it doesn’t always go smoothly, but we’re honest with our clients when things don’t go the way we hoped that they would and always work with the client to put it right.”
It is the value of old-fashioned customer service that still goes a long way. “Our account managers are technical, they used to be engineers or service desk folks, so they understand what we’re doing, and they don’t have targets or quotas, it’s about what is the best thing for the client,” says Iain. “That’s always driven our growth, we’ve not had to sell at all costs.
“It’s about finding the right solution for the right customer, and different customers need different things. We account for that with our way that we relate to them.”
Keeping on top of tech
With customers increasingly demanding AI-based solutions, it is important to keep on top of technological developments, and Iain is confident Infection Point does this.
“We’ve embraced a business operational structure called EOS – Entrepreneurial Operating System,” he explains. “It allows me to fulfil that visionary role. I can fire up a sandbox, do some development on solutions. If something works for us internally, we can then have conversations with our clients about that and take that learning and pass it on to the development team. They can productise it or stress test it, and then we can take that into products and services that we then sell.
“Our customers are open to ideas that means we can try things, and if we can turn it into something that works for them, then that’s great and if it doesn’t, we’ve got a philosophy internally called fail fast. If something’s not working, we don’t try and keep it there for too long. We’re happy to try something, put some money into a proof of concept, but if it doesn’t work, then we fail fast and move on to the next thing. You need the space to have the trial and error.”
Cloud migration and security
While there is plenty of activity at the cutting edge, there is also growing demand for digital transformation among SMB customers, Iain notes. “In this last 12 months we’ve probably done more SharePoint migrations than we’ve done before,” he says. “Customers are embracing it now. Servers are reaching end of life for some customers, so it’s the natural move for them to fully embrace the cloud. Then we can do some clever things with technology to tie it all together, either within the Microsoft, AWS or Google worlds.
Gone are the days where there’s a server in the office and everything’s tied to that, it’s a much more hybrid environment now.”
Security is another priority for Inflection Point. “A lot of it is about education, making sure that customers know not to engage with a suspicious-looking email,” he says. “We are ISO 27001, so we share those policies with customers and say, if someone deals with you on email and they ask you to change your bank account, make sure you speak to the person at that business you know before you do that. Don’t just action it over email. Something as simple as that can save businesses tens of thousands of pounds. Scams are getting more sophisticated, so it’s educating people to take a step back regardless of what it is and make sure it’s definitely safe.
“We’ve also got 24/7 SOC and things like that in place so that our on-call engineers get notified if something untoward happens on a customer site. We partner with Huntress and SentinelOne and use a lot of Microsoft stack in our security posture to ensure customers are as secure as possible and we can respond quickly if there is a breach.”
Future
Iain has ambitious goals for Inflection Point in the coming years – and he intends the company to be around for the long-term. “Our core goal is that we set ourselves is to become the most referred MSP in the UK,” he says.
“If our clients are referring us to other businesses, it means that we’re doing a good job for them and we’re servicing their needs. The monetary targets kind of happen alongside that. If everyone in the business, from the service desk to AI engineers, is thinking that they want to do such a good job that the customer wants to recommend us, then we win by virtue of that. If we can live up to that, then the growth targets and the scale come through that.
“It’s not about having a skilled sales team. It’s about having a business that does the right thing for clients, and our clients want to recommend us and promote us online. That says more to me than hitting a £10 million revenue target or whatever it might be.”
