MSP GLOBAL 2024 Recap: Digital Transformation Festival on the Spanish Coast

Building Your Ecosystem Has Never Been This Much Fun!

What happens when 2,000 digital transformation professionals gather at a seaside theme park in Spain? A LOT, as it turns out. There’s no substitute for experiencing MSP GLOBAL, since it’s unlike any other MSP conference on the planet, but here is a quick recap of our 2024 festival. First, though, let’s look at some numbers around our 2,000+ attendees…

Where the MSP GLOBAL community comes from:

What MSP GLOBAL attendees do:

Oh, and 47% of attendees held executive roles, and we expect that trend to continue as this festival grows: we’re anticipating over 3,500 attendees for MSP GLOBAL 2025.

Day 1

Since MSP GLOBAL had moved from Germany’s Nürburgring race track to PortAventura theme park outside Barcelona, the whole vibe shifted: everyone felt it during the previous evening’s Come2Gather welcome party. An outdoor party in an olive grove, with local cuisine, free-flowing beverages, and a DJ. Day 1 kicked off with some Serious Stuff: cybersecurity, AI, and automation for MSPs. 

The 2024 theme was Build Your Ecosystem, exploring the interconnected nature of the digital transformation industry so that service providers can harness that dynamic for their own success.

Besides the mainstage sessions and executive panel discussions, attendees took part in hands-on masterclasses and workshops, and also explored the Exhibit Area to meet the world’s top suppliers of tools and software with which tomorrow’s successful MSP will build their service packages.

We brought in some heavy hitters for the main stage: Chema Alonso, Chief Digital Officer of Telefónica, presented “Your Own Kernel of Digital Transformation”. Responsible for guiding one of the world’s largest telecoms from the Phone Book Era into today’s digital-first landscape, this renowned hacker and cybersecurity expert has to think of everything that can go wrong or right—and assemble the team, tools, and partners to help Telefónica reach the best possible outcome for over 380 million customers worldwide. So, yeah, he had a lot to teach the crowd! You can check out his session here:

We also heard from legendary footballer Jenni Hermoso. A clutch playmaker and Spain’s top all-time goal-scorer, Hermoso has won the World Cup with the Spanish national team; as well as five league titles, five Copas de la Reina, and a Champions League title with FC Barcelona. In 2023, Hermoso rallied the entire sport against sexist behavior—and demonstrated that the days of “business as usual” were numbered. Attendees got a rare chance to connect with one of the world’s most accomplished athletes for an inspiring conversation about mindset, teamwork, and reaching peak performance when the whole world is watching.

The rest of the day’s sessions covered core competencies for MSPs, communicated in-depth by leading experts.

The World Server Throwing Championship’s Spanish Qualifier wowed the crowd, as attendees donned gloves to throw heavy hardware as far as possible. The winner was Dierk “The Machine” Zeinecke—he threw so far, we had to extend the length of the pitch going forward!

Officials from the World Server Throwing Association (WSTA) have assured us that the Spanish Qualifier will return for MSP GLOBAL 2025, so start training now!

That evening’s ConneXion Party took over the Wild-West-themed area of PortAventura, with an immersive experience that most attendees had never experienced before (unless they’ve been to one of our other festivals, just saying).

Day 2

The first star speaker for Day 2 was Keren Elazari, a world-renowned “friendly” hacker and cybersecurity expert. She encouraged the crowd to think of hackers as the internet’s immune system: every forward-thinking service provider needs to understand how to harness one of tech’s major forces of nature. Having worked with leading security firms, government organizations, and Fortune 500 companies Elazari showed the MSP GLOBAL audience how to tap into the hacker mindset to identify the weak points in your products and systems—before someone else does it first. 

If you’re ready to learn from someone who’s been there and hacked that, just press Play:

“I really like the vibe here! The atmosphere is great, the location is fantastic. And the mood is really friendly—people are open, they’re collaborative, they’re sharing their stories. There’s a lot of things we can learn from each other, and the vibe is really conducive to that kind of conversation.”
—Karen Elazari, The Friendly Hacker, cybersecurity expert

Charlie Brooker, creator of the iconic Black Mirror series, anchored Day 2’s sessions with a frank, funny, and fascinating conversation of how technology can go wrong for society, how horror becomes comedy, and what digital transformation professionals can do to avoid becoming the bad guys in a Black Mirror episode—or, better yet, prevent the episode from happening in real life in the first place.

Since this conversation included clips from the series, we can’t put it on YouTube, so here are the episodes that Brooker and I discussed—check them out if you’re a digital-transformation decisionmaker in your organization:

• “Nosedive” (social scoring)
• “Joan is Awful” (T&C)
• “Shut Up and Dance” (cybersecurity)
• “San Junipero” (neurotechnology and VR and making people ugly-cry—this episode gets me every time)

The NIS2 Directive came into force a week after MSP GLOBAL, so we featured a presentation on how MSPs could prepare and communicate the new requirements to their customers. The NIS2 directive covers essential cybersecurity requirements, incident reporting, and risk management for critical infrastructure—and each EU member state is implementing it in its own way. The Decoding NIS2 workshop with i2Coalition Executive Director Christian Dawson addressed the challenges MSPs face in explaining and implementing NIS2 compliance to their customers, given the varied interpretations that will continue to emerge. We strongly suggest you watch this presentation…

The final session of the festival was a delightful surprise for the crowd, as Sagrada Familia Architect Jordi Faulí discussed the digital transformation of this iconic landmark. Antoni Gaudi began work on Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia basilica in 1882—and 140 years later it is almost fully built. Entrusted with its completion, Faulí started working on Sagrada Familia in 1990. He has brought technology such as CAD, 3D imaging, and computer simulation into his team’s toolkit. 

The closing networking event took place at an exclusive beach club that would make any Instagram influencer drool. The Mediterranean really turned it out that evening, delivering an absolutely stunning sunset as attendees, partners, and speakers connected under the stars. 

We think only one or two people ended up in the swimming pool, which is a far smaller number than we were expecting!

A Successful Digital Transformation Event for Almost Every Attendee

Almost every respondent to our post-event survey (94%, to be exact) said that they achieved their goal by the time MSP GLOBAL 2024 ended—and over 95% said they’d be back. So if 2025 will be your first time at the world’s #1 MSP-focused event, you’ll have some friendly people around who can show you the ropes.

“Having such a diverse range of attendees from the different regions is really, really valuable, because you can really see the insights of what’s affecting one person compared to another person—and being able to tailor that from your organization’s perspective is really key.”
—Yvette Laister, International Field Marketing Group Manager (EMEA & APAC), ConnectWise

Connect with MSP GLOBAL to Grow Your Ecosystem

We encourage you to attend the next edition of MSP GLOBAL, and to subscribe to our newsletter. You’ll see links for both right here on this page. You can also find us on YouTube, Instagram, and of course LinkedIn.