**Editor’s Note: Throughout the fourth quarter of 2018, as part of our Channel Futures/Channel Partners “In Focus” series, we will feature a series of galleries designed to help partners grow their businesses in 2019 and beyond.**

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a fairly new concept to most folks in the managed-services realm. Heck, make that the entire IT realm.

Most MSPs have yet to dip their toes into this particular technology pool, but HCI is quickly making a name for itself, emerging as a new, attractive opportunity with efficiency and flexibility that are appealing to managed service providers, SMBs and enterprises alike.

Hyperconvergence refers to both hardware and software that take many functions and features, and combines them into a smaller footprint. Essentially, it combines the technology stack of compute, network, storage and virtualization, and packages it all up in one integrated system. With a bow on top. Probably.

HCI is still very much in the very early stages of adoption, but it won’t stay that way for long. Hyperconverged systems have already become the standard foundation of the software-defined data center. According to IDC’s Worldwide Hyperconverged Systems 2015–2019 Forecast, hyperconverged infrastructure is an exploding market, one that’s projected to grow rapidly, reaching almost $4 billion by 2020, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 60 percent. Stratistics MRC predicts growth from a little more than $800 million in 2015 to $12.8 billion by 2022.

MSPs now more than ever are seeking to expand their capabilities in order to grow their customer bases. According to Tom Baumgartner, vice president of marketing at Virtuozzo, HCI is one of the golden tickets.

“Data tells us that the HCI marketplace is going to take off in the next three to four years, so there’s an enormous opportunity for MSPs to grow as they evolve to meet the demands of their customers as they grow their technology needs and businesses,” says Baumgartner.

Drew Lydecker, President and co-founder, Avant, the master agent and tech distributor, agrees that the winds of HCI change have begun to blow.

“The pace of change in IT is increasing, with hyperscalers launching [more than] 1,000 capabilities in the past year,” says Lydecker. “There has never been a better time for an MSP to assist customers in navigating the possibilities of the cloud, while helping them stay grounded in the realities of their legacy application migration challenges. Hyperconverged environments blend on-prem, cloud and connectivity options which are ripe for the role of the MSP as a trusted adviser.”

Scroll through our slide show for seven reasons why hyperconvergence is good for MSPs.