Now we're bringing that expertise to the midmarket: growing SMEs with real complexity and real ambition, who all too often have had to choose between enterprise pricing or basic break-fix solutions. In the blog below, Michael De Bruyn, Operations Director Managed Services, explains how we approach managed services for these companies, and why we have a strong opinion about it.

The managed services industry has a midmarket problem. And like most problems in this industry, nobody talks about it, because the people who could fix it are too busy selling it.

Here's how it usually goes. You're a growing company. Serious enough to have real IT complexity. Just a bit too small to be treated as an enterprise. So you get served one of two things: a hyperscaler solution priced for a bank with 5,000 seats, or a break-fix vendor with a suspiciously long response time.

Both fall short.

What you actually need is an IT partner who thinks like an entrepreneur and operates like a specialist. Someone who doesn't disappear the moment an incident is resolved. For 42 years, we've worked at being exactly that partner. Here's what we've learned, and here's what sets us apart from the crowd of providers who all claim to be different.

You know the drill. Something breaks, you call the helpdesk (side note: we scrapped that name too, here it's called a service desk), a cheerful agent reads from a script, decides the problem is above their pay grade and escalates it. Someone else picks it up, reads the first person's notes, misreads two of them, and asks you to describe the problem again. Half an hour later you're finally talking to a third person who actually knows what's going on.

The industry calls this efficient. We call it a bad Tuesday, and we scrapped it.

Instead of the classic L1/L2/L3 pyramid, we work with four purpose-built queues. Every ticket lands directly with an expert in that specific domain:

End user: Problems on the user's own end. Can't log in, the printer won't cooperate, the laptop is acting up. This queue is staffed by people who can diagnose a tricky Windows issue and also explain it to someone whose only interest in technology is that it quietly works in the background. Both skills matter. We hire for both.

Communication: Teams, telephony, email, video. The backbone of modern collaboration. A separate queue, because "I can't share my screen for a client call that starts in four minutes" is a different kind of emergency than a crashed server, and it deserves a different kind of specialist.

Workplace: Microsoft 365, device management, identity, the entire modern workplace. The tools people use every hour of the day. Managed, optimized and kept up to date by people who live and breathe this material.

Infrastructure: Servers, network, firewalls, virtualization, backup. The foundations. Monitored around the clock, followed up with urgency, and never left to a tired escalation chain at 2 in the morning.

The practical result: faster resolutions and fewer handoffs. Plus the quiet luxury of talking to someone who knows what they're doing right away.

Revolutionary, we know.

Every year we sit down with our customers for what we call the 'Vision Meeting.' Before you close this tab because 'annual review' sounds as thrilling as watching paint dry: give us a chance.

Forget the slide deck full of tickets and procedural formality. This is a strategic conversation about where your company is heading and what your IT needs to do to get you there.

We bring the full team: your Service Delivery Manager, one or more technical specialists, and someone from our own management. We come prepared with a well-developed view of where the technology landscape is heading, what's relevant for your sector and your size, and what we think you should be thinking about, both short and longer term.

The agenda deliberately looks forward. What did the past year teach us? Which IT market trends are genuine signal, not noise, for a company like yours? Which investments are coming up, and what's the honest return on investment for each? And crucially: how do changes within your organization (new offices, more people, a merger, a platform switch) flow through into your IT costs and infrastructure?

You walk away with a written report. Concrete. Prioritized. Usable. No vague talk.

Why do we invest so heavily in this? Because most midmarket leaders make budget decisions with incomplete information and with opinions handed to them by vendors. Genuine independent strategic input is missing. Fixing that is, in our view, part of the job. The Vision Meeting is where we earn the word 'partner' instead of just printing it on a brochure.

"Trusted advisor." Two words the IT industry has used so aggressively that they've lost almost all meaning. Every MSP website on the planet features them. For most, an upsell to a platinum support tier follows within two paragraphs.

So let's be concrete about what we actually mean by it.

We give advice that sometimes costs us revenue. If your infrastructure is in good shape and there's nothing to replace yet, we'll say so, even if we sell the replacement. If a particular vendor's offering doesn't fit your situation, we'll say so clearly, even if we have a commercial relationship with that vendor. We'd rather be right than agreeable.

We prioritize by risk. Whatever protects you most comes first, regardless of how much billable work it generates. We're transparent about what's genuinely urgent and what can safely wait.

We communicate like adults. Our technical specialists are hired and actively trained to explain complex matters in clear language to non-technical people. The general manager who has nothing to do with firewall topology should know exactly where things stand after every meeting. That translation work is simply part of the service.

And we take ownership from day one. During the transition to our management, we run a health check on everything within scope and map out the risks and improvement paths. We don't use pre-existing issues as a permanent excuse when something goes wrong under our watch. We take over the environment as it is. From that point on, we own the outcome.

This happens constantly in managed services: a customer signs what looks like an airtight contract, six months later something breaks, and the fix turns out not to be covered by a clause buried in fine print nobody read during the sales process.

We can't stand that.

Our fixed monthly price covers everything needed to keep your environment running and healthy. All end-user incidents and requests, however long the resolution takes. 24/7 monitoring. Security maintenance and patching. Secure password management via Delinea Secret Server, with automatic password rotation, full audit trails and session recording so you always know who did what in your environment. Backup and restore management. Asset management and lifecycle planning for devices. Bimonthly service reporting with full KPI transparency. And an annual Vision Meeting, because strategic input should be part of the package by default, not an expensive add-on.

The service windows follow reality: end-user support during office hours, technical backend support around the clock for issues that genuinely can't wait until morning.

What you read is what you get.

We assign every customer a dedicated Service Delivery Manager. One person. Always the same one, not a different account manager every time who needs to relearn your situation. Someone who knows your organization, manages your contract, tracks your KPIs, runs your service meetings, and is the single point of contact for everything we deliver.

If service quality drops below what was agreed, the SDM draws up a Service Improvement Plan. Want to talk strategy instead of support tickets? That's the right person too. Something goes wrong at an inconvenient moment? You know exactly who to call.

This is the foundation the entire service runs on. It sounds simple. But it turns out to be the part customers value most.

Almost every managed service provider tells you they're proactive. That they're strategic. That they're a partner, not a vendor. And most of them mean it too, in the sense that they genuinely want to be those things — when bandwidth allows, when the quarter is going well, when the client is big enough to warrant full attention.

What they don't tell you: for most SMEs, they're just a bit too small to fully deliver on that promise. The strategic conversations get shorter. The Vision Meetings turn into status updates. The trusted advisor becomes the person answering tickets.

We built our entire model around that gap, out of a genuine belief that SMEs, with their real complexity and real ambitions, deserve an IT partnership that doesn't quietly scale down the moment the contract is signed.

Curious what this looks like for your organization? Discover how Xylos approaches managed services for SMEs.

Michael De Bruyn is Operations Director Managed Services at Xylos. He has worked there for more than twenty years. He started as a systems engineer, after an earlier career step at HP, and grew into competence center lead infrastructure before taking charge of Xylos's central service desk. Today, Michael is responsible for how Xylos designs and delivers managed services, with deep expertise in infrastructure, virtualization and service desk operations. He writes about what growing companies should expect from an IT partner, and is happy to share a strong opinion about it.

Connect with Michael on LinkedIn.