Despite the current turbulent economic climate, research firms across the world are forecasting great opportunity for managed services providers. For instance the firm, Horizon Grand View Research, points out that in 2023 the market generated a revenue of USD 17,471.8 million. It forecasts that this figure will reach USD 42,125 million by 2023, and anticipates growth at a CAGR of 13.4% from 2024 to 2030. With that in mind, what are the trends to watch for on the path to growth? Caitlin Watkins, Marketing Manager, Zeus Cloud explains...
AI Integration Across the Organisation
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic concept. It has arrived in full force, and is here to stay, along with the opportunity to sell AI-led services. AI is offering organisations opportunities to enhance their service delivery, perfect their operations, and their wider capabilities to improve their offering to clients. AI also means different things to different people and has different applications across a multitude of industries and scenarios.
For example, AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are improving customer support and customer experience (CX) at scale for many organisations, especially those within large enterprises. They provide customers instant responses to common queries and route more complex issues to human agents, who can help customers solve their challenges. AI is ultimately helping organisations to deliver and enhance CX cost effectively and productively.
AI-led analytics is another area ripe for growth. Progressive tools that have AI integrated into them provide MSPs serving the IT industry with deeper insights into network performance, user behaviours, and security threats. This enables IT teams to make more informed decisions and execute strategic planning more effectively. AI arms them with knowledge about how to run networks, data centres and security teams better.
But, don’t just take my word for it. The British government released a press releaseabout the UK’s plans for AI. Key highlights include the fact that the UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan prompts over £14 billion in fresh inward investment across the country, and that over 13,000 jobs will be delivered to communities as global tech firms back Britain.
Cybersecurity Advancements: Strengthening Defences
Not a day goes by without hearing about a cyber-attack. Moreover, these attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Naturally, to combat this, IT teams must ensure they are equipped with tools that offer the capabilities to deal with today’s sophisticated attacks.
For MSPs this means that, there is opportunity to provide services that offer a combination of machine learning, data analytics and AI to help with recognising the signs of attacks; including hacking, data breaches, and malware infections. What is more, as the adoption of Zero Trust principles grows, it will become important for MSPs to form alliances with technology vendors and suppliers who can help them support and deal with these challenges for customers.
The Expansion of Cloud Services: Moving Beyond Simple Hosting
Cloud services will continue to be a hot proposition for MSPs to offer. Within this, there will be an increasing need for specialist providers that offer services that are tailored according specific industries’ needs. Further, adopting multi-cloud strategies will continue to grow in importance for clients – and so MSPs must be able to demonstrate that they can offer these solutions, and that they can seamlessly integrate them and manage them well for clients, while keeping costs at a minimum. This will be a tricky balancing act to manage for MSPs that don’t have the right technology partnerships in place to enable them to succeed.
Alongside this, the demand for edge computing continues to become prevalent. This typically involves processing data closer to where it is generated. For example, within IoT applications or autonomous systems. Therefore there is opportunity to align with partners who can enable this data processing nearer to where its created – and who can reduce latency and improving performance for these kinds of applications, among others.
Remote Work Support: Enhancing the Hybrid Workplace
The pandemic brought about a complete change in how and where we work, as many people worked from home. Since then, many companies have continued to reap the benefits of offering employees remote working options, favouring hybrid working as an option, seeing a combination of on-site work complemented by remote working.
To that end, there continues to be opportunity for MSPs to support this requirement for their clients, and so they need to be able to ensure that can offer clients access to their networks remotely and securely by offering to deploy robust VPN solutions, multi-factor authentication, and endpoint security to protect remote workers. Aside from this, they must continue to offer collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Zoom. This includes all necessary application integration, training, and ongoing support to enhance productivity.
Sustainability Initiatives: Green IT Services
The green agenda is increasingly prominent for many MSPs and their customers. For instance, within the data centre space, we will see more of these providers exploring the use of renewable energy and energy efficient technologies to aid in the management and operations of these facilities. Additionally, an area that shows growth potential for MSPs is to support clients with their IT waste management, and to support with ITAD (IT asset disposal). Can MSPs point their clients to suitable vendors that meet compliance requirements that are required by various industries for disposal and data destruction?
Conclusion
Despite the current difficult business environment and economic outlook, there is opportunity on the horizon for MSPs to grow their businesses and support their clients. AI applications are clearly hot on the agenda; cyber security challenges will always be there and will continue to evolve with the advent of AI – further, cloud access, data storage, connectivity and communications platforms continue to form the backbone of many organisations, as the business world grapples with ‘growth’ and sustainability challenges.
Couple the business challenges that these technologies solve with the opportunity available to MSPs to support clients, and then 2025 looks a lot more promising. UK government forecasts that the MSP market is well placed for growth, with an estimated CAGR of 12% through 2027. In addition, Straits Research valued the global managed services market at USD 348.12 billion in 2024, and has projected it to reach USD 393.02 billion in 2025 and USD 1037.46 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR of 12.9% during the forecast period (2025-2033).
Based on these forecasts there is immense opportunity. The question, however, for many MSPs is if they are equipped with the right partnerships in place, with the most suitable technology providers, to enable them to succeed through to 2033 in the UK and US?
