Managed Services Market: Still Growing, But How Fast?
The U.S. managed services market will grow from $29 billion in 2010 to $47 billion in 2015, predicts The Insight Research Corp. I’m often wary of IT market forecasts, especially since it’s impossible to predict how the economy and IT services demand will evolve four months from now — not to mention four years from now. But generally speaking, it sounds like Insight Research sees upside for MSPs as customers increasingly shift to IP networks. Here’s why.
Carol Wilson, whom I met during my days at Ziff Davis Media a decade ago, offers some deeper insights about the research report here on the Light Reading web site. Wilson, quoting Insight Research, writes:
“Integrating wireless and wireline technologies, providing 24-by-seven-by-365 support for applications, managing quality of service and moving to IP for voice, data and video are all among the challenges sometimes overwhelming business IT departments.”
Generally speaking, Wilson’s entry explores the managed services market from the telecom perspective. Smart move, especially for PC-centric MSPs that are trying to push beyond remote laptop, desktop and server management. The MSP opportunities for managed voice, data and video certainly seem real. Just last week, BlueWater Communications Group — a Cisco partner that recently built a managed services NOC — told me the company continues to see healthy growth from Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring for IP voice and data networks.
But how much growth can the MSP industry truly expect? Insight Research certainly sounds optimistic, predicting annual growth of about 15 percent through 2015. Plenty of VARs and MSPs would welcome 15 percent annual growth over the next four years. But I wonder how many of those VARs and MSPs will actually achieve — or exceed — that growth rate?
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I agree completely, VoIP is a ideal entry point for VARs to introduce a managed service to their customers. Currently The telco monitors and maintains their voice systems with a service, so it makes sense for them to utilize a service for their new VoIP system. Also, most SMBs don’t see the need for 24/7 operation of their systems. VoIP is the perfect application for making them see the need.
Another product that msp’s could look into offering is
monitoring of Applications (Citrix) and VOIP QOS across WAN links.
Products such as Path View Cloud from http://www.apparentnetworks.com
make the cost of deployment not out of reach with their SAAS offering.
Lots of emerging white label hosted PBX systems for VARs and MSPs in the market. Curious to know if readers are pursuing those white label services yet…
-jp
Very interesting article. You are correct it is very hard to get anywhere near an accurate prediction 4 years into the future! You never know you could quadruple that amount or even only get half.. Like you mentioned above there is no way to accurately tell you can guess and give an educated guess which is still okay to think about and dream about. 🙂
Cloud offerings are also proving to be a huge growth market for MSP’s/VAR’s especially offering off-site data backup and disaster recovery services. By partnering with 6fusion MSP’s/VAR’s are able to begin offering these services without up front capital expense for hardware/ infrastructure. 6fusion is 100% channel driven. ehensz@6fusion.com
One thing I am seeing, it may not be individual companies that grow 15% a year, but the industry will. A lot of what I am seeing is a lot of what I saw in the Mortgage Industry 10 years ago. I started to post about it here, but it got really long, so I made a blog post here: http://180mysales.blogspot.com/
Growth in cloud services will surely help improve industry growth. I think Amazon RDS is actually growing at much faster rate, around $500m per year.