Tough times for VARs, but what about MSPs?

I thought this topic was important enough to write about given everything going on in the financial markets. An article today proclaimed tough times ahead for VARs as businesses are cutting back on IT spending. Now, here comes the bad news. If any of you reading this are still pushing product as your sole source of revenue, this is the day we've been warning you about.

Remember all those times when people used to say, the days of being a pure play VAR were over and that you need to think about adding services to your revenue mixture? Well, that day has come. The one silver lining in all the bad financial news is that IT services spending appears to be static. Sure, projects and big tickets items might be put on hold but companies cannot afford to cut back on their IT services budgets. Let's face it, most companies cannot stand to see their IT performance decrease at all. If anything, they need their performance levels to increase even if their budgets are decreasing.

So all you MSPs out there reading this, be thankful you aren't a VAR anymore.