Fall is conference season for managed service providers, with NinjaOne hosting an annual partner gathering this week and ConnectWise prepping for its popular IT Nation show next week. Ask Abacus President Jonathan Bohrer about his travel plans, and he’d be just as likely to mention the next dermatology conference.
The MSP executive means no disrespect to channel events, but for him, they illustrate the difference between generalist and specialist MSPs. Abacus’s focus on financial services and healthcare has given the New York-based firm an avenue to clients that isn’t open to spray-and-pray MSPs.
“They can go to industry events but their potential clients are not there,” Bohrer told Channel Dive. “Their competitors are there, and they can learn how to run their business better, but those types of conferences don't really get you new business.”
A conference for private equity CFOs or dermatology clinic owners is another story, he said.
“We have a pretty narrow captive audience to go after, which is a benefit and a tailwind to our go-to-market effort,” Bohrer said.
Founded in 2008 as an MSP for investment management companies, Abacus expanded into sub-verticals of the financial services sector. First it was asset managers and hedge funds, then PE companies, family offices and investment banks, Bohrer said.
The healthcare practice has also grown via sub-verticals. Abacus made a big splash into the market when its PE investor FFL Partners purchased Medicus IT in 2024. Medicus had launched with a focus on community health and non-hospital organizations.
The industry runway is long.
“We have a ton of shoulder room in healthcare because the sub-verticals there are even more vast,” Bohrer said. “We can branch into vision, we can do senior care.”
A foundation of people
Any MSP can extol the virtues of a vertical play, but execution is another matter. It starts at the cultural level of an IT services firm, Bohrer said. Abacus laid a foundation for financial services by hiring people directly from the vertical.
“The first 50 people that we hired at Abacus … were technologists that came out of the hedge funds and private equity firms and investment banks that we all worked at,” Bohrer said.
Bohrer was the managing director of finance at a broker dealer before he joined Abacus as CFO in 2014. Time in the industry taught him and his colleagues the language of finance.
The firm followed a similar playbook to grow its healthcare business.
“The people came out of doctors' offices and clinics,” Bohrer said. “They understood the complexity of an electronic medical record system and how that rolls into revenue lifecycle management.”
The complexity of each industry has led Abacus to retain two CROs. Jonathan Shapiro left a fintech company to be Abacus’ financial service CRO in 2023. Steven Bass joined in 2025 to be healthcare CRO. Abacus also has two customer experience teams that specialize in regulatory challenges pertinent to the two sectors.
“That's really important that we maintain our identity in those spaces,” Bohrer said. “They have different needs.”
Vertical practices can grow organically, or through acquisitions.
An entrepreneur with a background in healthcare and a couple of anchor clients can make a vertical play, Bohrer said. But a firm can’t just dip into an industry and expect to be taken seriously.
“If you're a generalist or even somewhat vertical-focused… it's really hard to say, 'Okay, we're going to start a healthcare vertical. I'm going to march right into an orthopedic conference and start meeting with COOs and CFOs of orthopedic platforms,’” Bohrer said. “That's really tough to do because a lot of this is credibility, experience and time.”
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that the name of the company profiled is Abacus.
