Q&A with John Pepper, Founder and CEO, Managed247

‘Too much of the industry still sells cloud and AI as simple and self-managing’

Managed247 is a finalist in the Best UK/European Cloud Services Provider, MSP of the Year and Best Cloud Support Provider categories in Computing's Cloud Excellence Awards.

John Pepper is the founder and CEO of Managed247, the UK managed service provider he established in 2009 to give growing organisations enterprise-grade IT support delivered entirely from the UK. He leads a business built around a single conviction: that unplanned IT outages should no longer be a fact of business life. Under his direction, Managed247 has grown a 24/7, multilingual, UK-based service desk, a multi-cloud practice across Azure, AWS and Google Cloud, and its own monitoring platform, LiveTrace. He is a vocal advocate for resilience, observability and keeping IT support genuinely local.

What would winning this award mean to you, your company and your team?

Winning a Cloud Excellence Award would be recognition for the people who earn it every day, our UK engineers on the service desk. Managed247 has always taken a deliberately unfashionable position: every engineer, on every shift, based in the UK, with a multilingual desk and no offshore. That costs more and it is harder to scale, but it is why customers trust us with their most critical environments. An award like this validates that choice in front of the whole industry. For a business competing against far larger names, external recognition matters. It tells prospective customers that a UK provider can deliver cloud and managed services at the highest standard, and it tells our team that the bar they hold themselves to is seen and valued.

What is your company's proudest achievement over the past year?

Two things stand out. The first is launching LiveTrace, our own next-generation monitoring and observability platform, built out of years of running real customer environments. It brings IT, cloud, OT and IoT into a single view and helps our teams cut through alert noise to the underlying issue, which is exactly how we move customers towards fewer outages. The second is the depth of our cloud practice: we now design, migrate and manage across Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud, and a customer NPS of 94.1 tells us we are doing it in a way clients genuinely value. I am proud that both come from the same place, the service desk, rather than from a slide deck.

What are the key demands you have seen from your customers in the last 12 months?

Three demands have dominated. First, control of cloud cost. As environments sprawl, customers want spend that is visible and governed, which is why our FinOps work has become central rather than a nice-to-have. Second, security and governance that can be evidenced, not just claimed, particularly as regulation tightens and AI enters the picture. Third, help getting AI ready safely, especially around Microsoft 365 and Copilot, where the appetite is huge but the governance questions are real. What links all three is a desire for one accountable partner rather than a stack of suppliers. Customers are tired of finger-pointing between vendors. They want someone who owns the outcome across cloud, security and support, and who will pick up the phone in the UK when it matters.

What do you see as the main opportunities for your industry in the coming year, and how do you plan to capitalise on them?

The biggest opportunity is helping businesses turn AI from experiment into something operational and safe. Most organisations now have the appetite, but they lack the underlying readiness: the identity, data governance and modern work and Copilot foundation that AI actually depends on. That is squarely where we add value, so we are investing to meet it. The second opportunity is distributed, multi-cloud estates becoming the norm rather than the exception. As workloads spread across Azure, AWS and Google Cloud and out to the edge, the winners will be the partners who can see and manage the whole picture, which is exactly what we built LiveTrace to do. We capitalise by staying close to the service desk and letting real customer problems shape where we invest, rather than chasing every headline.

Which new technology trend are you placing your bets on?

Self-healing operations. The industry has spent a decade getting better at detecting problems, but detection still lands the work on a human at 2am. The real shift, and the one we are betting on, is systems that use observability, automation and AI to resolve common issues before anyone is disturbed, and increasingly before users even notice. It is why we built LiveTrace, and why we are pushing hard on AI-assisted operations and, on the Microsoft side, on Copilot agents that can take defined tasks off people's plates safely. Very few providers are claiming this ground yet, which tells me it is early and real rather than hype. Our bet is simple: the future of managed services is not more alerts, it is fewer outages, and self-healing is how we get there.

How has your industry changed over the past year, and what changes do you think it still needs to make?

Cloud has grown up. The conversation has moved from migration to operation: cost, resilience, security and getting real value from what has already been moved. AI has accelerated everything, raising both the ambition and the risk. What still needs to change is honesty about complexity. Too much of the industry still sells cloud and AI as simple and self-managing, when distributed estates are harder to secure, harder to cost and harder to keep available than ever. The sector also needs to rebuild trust around support itself. Offshoring and automation have hollowed out the human experience for many customers. I would like to see the industry value genuinely local, accountable support again, because when something critical breaks, people do not want a chatbot or a queue. They want an expert who owns the problem.