7 Key Channel Insights from the MSP Community

Datto recently surveyed more than 1,600 managed service providers (MSPs) around the world to learn about their day-to-day lives, businesses and IT channel predictions.

By tapping into our vast partner base across the world, we obtained a wealth of statistics covering everything from the technology MSPs are using and business challenges they’re facing to where they get their news and how many industry events they attend annually.

To share these unique insights and statistics, we published our findings in our third annual State of the MSP Report. This report provides us the opportunity to go beyond just a snapshot of today’s MSPs and instead take a deeper dive into various aspects of their businesses and lives.

• On average, today’s MSPs are between the ages of 30-49 and report their organizations have been in business for more than16 years. Additionally, nearly 100% of the MSPs surveyed say that now is as good a time as ever to be in their industry.
• The majority of MSPs report annual revenue between $1 million and $5 million. Over 80% of MSPs report driving a portion of their earnings from recurring services.
• 55% of MSPs report having between one and 100 clients. 89% of MSPs also report making at least one client site visit per week. In the next 12 months, more than half of MSPs predict adding somewhere between one and 10 new clients.
• The majority of MSPs are accessing Facebook and LinkedIn on a daily basis, and list Reddit, Spiceworks and MSPAlliance as the top three online communities they’re hanging out in.
• Marketing and sales continue to be the top two pain points of global MSPs, followed by work/life balance, revenue growth, and ransomware and cybersecurity.
• Nearly half of MSPs report recommending Dell servers to clients, followed by one quarter who recommend HPE. 44% of MSPs report utilizing VMware as their virtualization software, closely followed by 43% who report using Microsoft Hyper-V.
• MSPs report RMM, cloud storage management, productivity software, business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR), and professional services automation (PSA) among the solutions that positively impacted them the most last year.

This is just a small sample of what we have learned from the channel in our most recent report. If you’re interested in learning even more about the makeup of the MSP community in 2019, download the entire report today. It’s full of lifestyle information, news consumption and some fun bits of information about the lives of the MSPs who make up the IT channel community. Check it out today.

Rob Rae is Vice President of Business Development, Datto.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.