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It sounds suspiciously logical, and very, very sensible, but the revelation that Channel organisations need to pay more attention to what their customers want was the major theme of our recent Managed Services + Hosting (MSH) Summit. From the first keynote onwards, the importance of the customer was centre stage at the MSH Summit. While customer relations has always been important, it seems that the ‘sell and forget’ mentality of the traditional channel model – perhaps not strictly accurate, but rather too prevalent nonetheless – guarantees failure. Customers want their channel suppliers to understand their needs, to work alongside them and, above all, to be able to trust them. After all, with the responsibility for IT increasingly devolving from the end user (who, once upon a time, bought tin and fitted it all together, or got an SI to do this), to the channel and service providers, who not only sell solutions, but then have to run and support them on behalf of the customer. In simple terms, MSPs are becoming the IT departments for many end users. Presented by Philip Alsop, Editor of Digitalisation World.