2019 State of the Channel Survey: Managed Services in the Majority at Last

There’s plenty of upside ahead for both mature markets like managed services and up-and-coming ones like cybersecurity and the Internet of Things, according to our latest channel opinion study. By Rich Freeman

Reader ROI:

THOUGH IT FEELS LIKE MSPs are yesterday’s news, this is the first year more respondents offer managed services than break-fix.

MANAGED ENDPOINT and network providers are adding more as-a-service offerings and venturing into fields like telco and print.

LARGE PORTIONS OF THE CHANNEL offer cloud solutions, but much smaller numbers are making serious money from them.

MOMENTUM FOR THE INTERNET OF THINGS is building fast, as is demand for security services.

GOOD NEWS, MSPs. This managed services thing just might be catching on.

Sounds like old news, right? Vendors, analysts, and industry experts have been talking up managed services since well before ChannelPro’s 2007 debut, and break-fix providers have been embracing the recurring revenue business model in growing numbers for nearly as long.

Yet hard as it is to believe, this year’s ChannelPro State of the Channel study is the first ever in which a higher proportion of participants offer managed services (65 percent) than break-fix services (59 percent).

And while the managed services market has been a fixture on the channel landscape for what feels like forever to many of us, further data from our research makes clear that there’s room for additional growth—lots of it, in fact. Just 27 percent of participants in our 2019 survey make half or more of their revenue from managed services, and 57 percent expect managed services to account for a greater share of their revenue this year. Far from being yesterday’s news, the managed services story is just getting started.

“There are undeniably more managed services customers out there than there are qualified manage service providers,” says Charles Weaver, CEO of membership organization MSPAlliance.

Managed services isn’t the only supposedly mature market with plenty of growth potential either. Our latest research suggests there’s both accelerating adoption and continued opportunity ahead in other much-discussed markets as well, including cloud computing, security, and the still-nascent Internet of Things (IoT).