Datto’s latest Global State of the MSP report says that interest across the channel in the managed service model has continued to rise with the coronavirus pandemic only accelerating the trend.
Datto thinks that MSPs are becoming the dominant channel delivery model.
The firm found there was plenty of poitivity among UK managed service providers (MSPs), with 98 per cent thinking “it is good to be MSP right now” and 81 percent reporting that they came through the pandemic with revenues either unchanged or improved.
More than 97 percent of UK MSPs that expected revenues to increase over the next three years.
When it came to hunting out the potential problems, Datto found that revenue growth, competition and profitability were all issues that caused concern for MSPs.
On a technical front, security remained top of the pile for those MSPs looking to help SME customers with their top demands. Almost all (99 percent) of those quizzed by Datto for the report said they offered a managed security service. That can come from different sources, with UK channel players happy to offer co-managed security tools, partner with a managed security service provider (MSSP) or with some other form of security expert.
The impact of the pandemic could also be seen in the attitudes towards the cloud, with 58 percent of UK respondents indicating that between 50 percent and 75 percent of their customers’ workloads were now in the cloud. Those included email servers, databases and application servers. In terms of the public cloud players, Amazon Web Services (AWS) leads the way, slightly ahead of Microsoft Azure, with Google Cloud coming in third.
The global picture showed that increased competition was the main concern for MSPs, with it clear that there was a lot at stake for those that had gained “trusted adviser” status with a small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) customer. This is the first time competition has topped the list of global concerns, which Datto saw as a sign that the MSP market was maturing and there was pressure on partners to offer differentiated and relevant solutions.
Demand for security and an increasing shift by users towards the cloud were also seen across the world. The majority of those responding to the research agreed that those areas offered opportunities going forward, the report says.
