"It’s really tough," Constantine said. "One of the big challenges when you go from a capital model to a recurring revenue model, you have to reinvent and reengineer how you account for things internally. How you pay your sales people. There is a cashflow issue from a finance perspective to manage. You may have a sales rep that used to make $1,000 commission on a $100,000 deal. Now all of a sudden that $100,000 deal becomes $700 a month. How do I pay my sales rep? How do I solve that problem? Do I still pay him $1,000 or do I pay him over time? So there’s a lot of business questions. There’s a lot of cashflow issues."

ScanSource has solutions that help mitigate some of these issues, including a tool called Flexibility that is designed to relieve some of the stress of financing hardware by dispersing the proceeds automatically to appropriate parties in deals.

Dixon notes that there are also operational differences in the MSP model, including seeing less revenue upfront per customer, meaning companies are going to have to earn more business to retain the same profit."The old model was sort of rich and easy and traditional," Dixon said. "The new model means that on a per-customer basis, I’m going to make less money, so I’m going to have to have a lot more customers by a multiple of ten to maintain the same bottom line. Now, if I’m really good at this and can be very efficient at it, my top-line might remain the same, or even less, but my bottom line is even more profitable, because of efficiencies that are gained from managing these devices remotely."

Dixon notes that an MSP does not need to bankroll as many onsite technicians or trucks full of equipment as a traditional VAR needs to, and it is that cut in expenses that can lead to a higher profit.

That transition is what Constantine sees partners asking for the most help with. Still, he says reshaping the business model is an arduous task that takes years, and resellers need to start this transition process now, and not put it off. 

"Ten years from now, most of our partners are probably going to sell in the managed services model," Constantine said. "It’s going to take that long for the transition to happen. That shouldn’t be taken as an excuse to put it off, but it’s a process that I’ve heard in other places takes seven years for a reseller to evolve their model from a traditional hardware-software model to an as-a-service model. It’s a process that people should be patient with. They should understand that it takes time from a traditional model to a managed services model. It’s something that you need to do now or else you’ll just be another year or two behind."