I stopped thinking of them as an MSP a long time ago.

I’ll be honest about where we started. My experience of managed service providers, across more than one company, had taught me to expect a fairly predictable relationship: a ticket queue, a monthly invoice, a quarterly review where someone tries to sell you more licences, and a lot of “that’s out of scope.”

So when New Horizon-IT came on board, my expectations were set accordingly. Keep the lights on, answer the phone when something breaks, don’t surprise me on the bill.

What actually happened has genuinely changed how I think about what an IT partner can be.

The everyday stuff, done properly

Let’s start with the basics, because they matter. Day-to-day IT support is the thing every MSP promises and plenty get wrong. Our team doesn’t dread logging a ticket anymore. Issues get picked up quickly, explained in plain English, and — crucially — actually resolved rather than bounced around. When something has gone wrong out of hours, they’ve been there. When our infrastructure has needed serious attention, from certificate renewals to recovering services under pressure, they’ve handled it calmly and kept us informed throughout.

That alone would have made them a good MSP. It’s everything else that made them a different kind of partner.

Challenging our costs, not padding them

One of the first things New Horizon-IT did was go through our vendor and licensing estate line by line. Not to upsell us — to strip out what we didn’t need. They challenged renewals, questioned quotes, and negotiated on our behalf as if it were their own money.

The result speaks for itself: we’re on track for around £300,000 in year-on-year savings — roughly half of our total software spend — at the same time as our capability has gone up.

Building, not just supporting

Here’s where the traditional MSP definition really fell apart. We had business processes running on off-the-shelf tools that didn’t quite fit — expensive, inflexible, and full of workarounds. Rather than shrugging and pointing us at another SaaS subscription, New Horizon-IT built with us.

They’ve designed and delivered bespoke CRM solutions and internal applications tailored to how we actually work, along with the automation that connects our systems together — so data flows where it needs to without anyone rekeying it. When we’ve needed changes, they’ve iterated with us in days, not procurement cycles.

The part most businesses miss

And here’s the piece I’d urge other leaders to think hard about, because I suspect a lot of businesses are now doing what we’re doing — building internal apps and automations — without truly understanding what they’ve taken on.

The moment you build your own software, you own the risk that comes with it. Who’s securing it? Who’s patching it? Where does it sit on your risk register? What happens when the person who built it leaves? Off-the-shelf tools bundle those answers into the subscription price; a homegrown app doesn’t — unless someone is deliberately doing that work.

That’s what New Horizon-IT do differently. Everything they’ve built for us is treated like production infrastructure, because it is: properly architected, backed up, monitored, patched, and supported by the same team that built it. Security isn’t an afterthought bolted on at the end — it’s designed in, documented, and reflected in our risk register, so I can stand in front of the board and speak to it with confidence. As a CIO, that governance layer is worth as much to me as the applications themselves.

The commercial impact has been twofold: we’ve replaced licence costs with assets we own, and we’ve bought back hours of our team’s time every single week — without quietly accumulating a shadow-IT risk problem in the process.

What I’d say to another CIO

If your mental model of an MSP is a helpdesk with a markup on hardware, I understand — mine was too. New Horizon-IT challenged that perception by simply behaving like part of our team: honest about what we should and shouldn’t spend money on, capable enough to build what we couldn’t buy, rigorous enough to secure and govern what they build, and reliable enough to trust with the boring-but-critical everyday work.

They didn’t just support our IT. They changed what we believed an IT partner could do.