@Strawman I agree with your remarks about Charif. My main takeaways from the session in addtion were:

• On $MSFT threat arising from features in Syntex, one driver of the incentive for MSPs (apart from the technical / security argument) was that margins offered by $MSFT are thin, and so MSPs are continually looking to broaden their offering to customers. So they have a commercial incentive to have it in their portfolio offering, and to sell it.
• $DSE are finding that Compliance Archiving is a big driver for customers in several industries facing increasingly stringent legal/regulatory demands. Functionality to deliver this offers incremental margin as well as gives assurance to customers that they can extract the required data from the host cloud platform (because it is archived separately in the first place).
• $DSE are laser-focused on their Partner channel to market (either distributors-to-MSPs and to MSPs directly). Hence, you can't access $DSE tools via the $MSFT Store or the $QBO store. That was why I asked the question about $INTU. By making the partners the unique channel, they are making their partners strong (even if the channel via the "stores" might not be available... don't know about this).
• Customer concentration: Top 10 IT-distributors are 65% revenue and they are constantly working to diversify this. (I'd love to know the top-3 %: if that's 50% then the concentration is very high.)

On the $MSFT threat, I was listening to @Strawman and Scott Philips on the MF Money podcast over the weekend, and there was an interesting discussion about $RMD, which I thought is also helpful in the context of $DSE. Basically, all of our businesses (apart from those natural, regulated monopolies I don't invest in) face competitive threats, both from similar products and potentially disruptive technologies. But we don't sell them all and just invest in safe monopolies with boring regulated returns.

Because there can be a tendancy not to focus on the competitive landscape when analysing companies, whenever there is newsflow of a new competitive or technological threat, there is a tendancy to consider this against a "zero baseline", when in actual fact it is often just yet another piece of a complex and constantly dynamic competitive landscape.

Clearly, there is a balance to be struck in weighing changes in the technological and competitive landscap, and it is important not to be blinkered. But the word is balance.

Whether it is Syntex or GLP-1s, both are new factors for me to monitor on the competitive environments of $DSE and $RMD, respectively. But that is a very different response than either marking down the value of the shares or, worse still, selling the shares (as many have).

I remain a happy holder of $DSE and would consider adding to my small position over time as they continue to deliver.