The world is changing.
So are we.
The industry's answer hasn't kept up
For twenty years, the MSP industry has answered every new business problem with another product. Another tool, another renewal, another line on the invoice. It worked when the world was simpler - pick a product, install it, move on.
That model can't deliver what businesses now need. Cyber risk lives in the joins between tools. AI runs on systems, not products. Selling more into a fragmented estate doesn't get a business to safer ground. It gets them further from it.
We have to be honest. We ran that model too.
For a while, Babble was one of the most acquisitive businesses in the UK. We bought specialist companies across communications, cyber, cloud and customer experience. We grew quickly. We were good at it - and on paper, it looked like exactly what an ambitious MSP should be doing.
But somewhere along the way, the same uncomfortable thing became impossible to ignore. We were all getting bigger. We were all adding product lines and winning awards. But were the customers the industry has been serving actually getting more successful? UK productivity has stalled. Technology bills have never been higher. Once we’d seen that, we couldn’t unsee it.
We’d all been measuring success by growth. Customers were measuring it by what actually changed for them.
So, we’re changing how we work
Today, we start in a different place.
Not with a product catalogue. With how your business actually operates today - where friction is building, where risk exists and what needs to improve first.
Because most businesses don’t need everything replaced. They need the right technology, the right specialist expertise to build and run it and a relentless focus on continuous improvement.
That’s why we think differently about the tools businesses rely on every day - what we call the Core Operating System.
What customers tell us now sounds different
We are in constant communication with Babble about where we might be heading and how they can help us. I am hugely impressed by their ability to listen and adapt their solution to help us move our business forward.
The team is the product. Always was.
Most technology partners treat delivery as the end of the relationship. Install it, hand it over, wait for the renewal.
We've rebuilt Babble around the opposite idea. The work starts when delivery is done. That's meant deliberate choices: specialists across every core discipline, senior product leadership focused on staying ahead, a customer success function building around the value you actually get, and serious investment in the technology and support that runs underneath it all.
The industry stops at "supplied." We're building Babble to start there.
We've done a lot of change at Babble - built out our specialists, strengthened the product organisation, deepened the leadership bench. Customer success is the last critical piece of that journey to becoming a trusted advisor. Not a rebadged support function. Deep specialists whose only job is to help customers get value from what they're spending. I'm genuinely excited to be leading this build.