"Perfect sync for the first time in 10 years": What MSPs gain when they conquer tool sprawl

For managed service providers (MSPs) and managed security service providers (MSSPs) working with dozens or hundreds of clients every day, automation is critical to increasing efficiency, improving profit margins, reducing analyst burnout, and, of course, providing value to the customer. 

But when the default response to an operational problem or new use case is to buy a tool to automate it, MSPs may introduce risks that many aren’t accounting for. 

According to Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, data breaches with third-party involvement now make up 48% of all breaches – a 60% increase since last year. 

For IT and security service providers, each new tool adds complexity:

• Vendor access: every third-party tool added to the stack requires access to client environments, billing systems, and sensitive data

• Tool sprawl: multiple, disconnected tools increase costs and make it harder for analysts to manage, centralize, and act on alerts

• Loss of control: MSPs lose the ability to granularly respond to real operational and client needs, instead becoming locked into vendor-specific ways of working

At the same time, building from scratch and maintaining their own tools requires resources that many IT and security service providers don’t have. This can lead to reliability concerns and reduced business resilience as teams spend more time troubleshooting than delivering results for clients.

Christian Kelly, CTO of Xantrion, has been thinking about this problem longer than most. Eight years ago, before platforms like Tines existed, Xantrion was already running automation scripts in Azure – and quickly encountering challenges. 

“Theoretically, these are all scripts you could run wherever, but how are you going to monitor them? How are you going to know they’re running properly? Know they’re stable?” Christian says. “We’re building workflows that are critical to the business, and, if they break, we have big problems on our hands.”

We decided early on that we don’t want to build platforms. We want to build workflows on a platform.

Choosing the right tools

To do this, Xantrion needed a platform that would allow them to orchestrate and automate key processes across multiple clients from one central place, without introducing risk or sacrificing control.

For Christian, the choice of platform is crucial. “I think a lot of smaller MSPs have all sorts of things running everywhere for free or cheap,” he says. “They don’t see the value in it all being in one place, properly monitored, and secured. We saw that value early on.”

“Most MSPs will buy many products to solve problems and they end up with tool sprawl,” Christian says. “I’m very opposed to that organizationally. I don’t want to bring in tools that need broad access to our clients because of the downstream and supply chain risks.”

Reliability was also a major factor. “If a platform was causing more than one outage every couple of years, that would be very problematic for us,” Christian says. “I know that some other platforms have not scaled correctly and have a lot more availability issues.”

Ultimately, it comes down to trust: the trust clients put in their MSP, and the trust an MSP puts in their chosen platform. And, as Christian notes, that trust “erodes fast when your key system is failing and causing outages.”

Where intelligent workflows beat point products: License reconciliation and ticket triage

After trying other tools on the market, Xantrion turned to Tines, which Christian says is now “the core orchestration tool for us.”

Here are two powerful use cases Xantrion built in Tines, solving a decades-old billing problem and winning back a full-time employee’s worth of time:

1. License reconciliation workflow

License reconciliation was one use case Christian knew he didn’t want to buy a product for. 

“Firstly, it would give some random company deep access to our clients, billing system, and Microsoft 365,” he says. “Secondly, there were enough unique things about how we did billing that would make it complicated to just use a cookie-cutter solution.”

As a result, Christian had been doing it manually for a decade.

Using Tines, he pulled together a workflow in a week, using APIs to stitch everything together. “It was very empowering,” Christian says. “I’m not a developer, but because I understood the business process of what needed to get done better than anyone else, I was able to walk myself through it, rather than taking a developer’s time.”

“Doing this task manually used to take 6 or more hours at the end of each month and more importantly wasn’t perfectly accurate. This now gives me back hours at the busiest time of the month."

Now, when products get added to Xantrion’s clients, it flows directly into ConnectWise, their ticketing and billing system. “We’re now in perfect sync for the first time in 10 years,” Christian says. “Every product is accounted for both ways.”

The result? Cleaner, more accurate billing for Xantrion’s clients, and hours of time saved for Christian.

2. AI-powered ticket triage system

“Ticket automation is a big play right now in our industry,” Christian says. “Everyone’s trying to sell a ticket triage product.”

Those products have a hidden cost, however. “Someone else is in control,” he says. “Maybe you can edit the prompts a little, but you’re not in complete control over what you want.”

Instead of going with a third-party vendor, Xantrion built their own system in Tines that’s designed for their requirements and standards.

“Tickets come in, they go through six different AI agents that each do their own specific thing, and they come out to the dispatchers with all of this data,” Christian says. “Summarization, categorization, urgency – everything is defined and ready to go.”

Now, they have end-to-end control and aren’t at the mercy of a vendor’s feature roadmap. “If something’s important to us, we can just go put it in there,” Christian says.

They won back more than control. “That one workflow has saved us an immense amount of time,” Christian says. “Probably at least a full time employee’s worth of time that we can do better things with.”

What Xantrion has gained: 3 benefits of intelligent workflows over buying point solutions

Building workflows instead of buying individual products hasn’t just enabled Xantrion to reduce risk and maintain control. It’s also given them some unique advantages, from improving resource management to helping them become better partners to their clients.

1. Free up resources for meaningful work

Xantrion’s license reconciliation and ticket triage workflows reduced repetitive manual work that can lead to analyst burnout, instead allowing them to redeploy those resources to more interesting – and profitable – projects.

“We looked at how much time we were spending on each ticket with repetitive work,” Christian says. “We realized there’s a bigger arm of our company that is service delivery, and even a small improvement to that could really make a difference.” 

We’ve been able to do real, meaningful things that have moved the needle in profitability for us rather than just going out and buying yet another product.

2. Differentiate themselves in the market

Xantrion’s investment in automation and orchestration has become a differentiator to prospects. “It helps us in sales conversations,” Christian says. “We talk about our capabilities as an MSP, what differentiates us, and the investments we’ve made.”

Building workflows on one trusted platform also means Xantrion can adopt new capabilities as they emerge, rather than repeating a vendor evaluation cycle every time a new use case comes up. 

“So many vendor roadmaps are static and stale,” Christian says. “Tines is one of the very few products we use where we’re getting new capabilities and value out of it almost every month.”

3. Become a deep trusted partner

“A lot of MSPs will try to build things for their clients as a way to make themselves stickier,” Christian says. “I’m not a big proponent of that.”

What clients want from an app ebbs and flows: first it was big data, then Power BI, and now it’s AI. Chasing every trend requires MSPs to build highly specialized client-facing teams, then hope that you can sell enough to keep those teams busy before the next big thing comes along.

That’s not how Xantrion works. Instead, they choose to only develop internally, then use that experience to advise at a high level rather than building the solution for them. 

As a result, clients see Xantrion as “a deep, trusted partner,” Christian says. “Getting into these things and learning them on our own only helps us be better consultants and add more value to our clients.”

Fewer vendors, greater control

Buying often seems like the simpler option on paper, particularly compared to the overhead of developing and managing custom tools. But as Xantrion’s experience shows, building in a trusted platform like Tines lets MSPs and MSSPs create solutions that meet their exact needs, helping them to maintain control, scale securely, and deliver the best possible service to their clients.