The Top 3 Surprising Results from Our State of the MSP Market Survey

OpsRamp, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, updated its state of the MSP market survey for the first time in two years with some surprising results. The survey was the largest of its kind with more than 600 participants across three geographic regions and 24 countries. While MSPs are chasing new opportunities around cloud computing and trying to improve operational efficiency through automation, they’re more bullish about growth than ever while still struggling to overcome tool sprawl, even as they consolidate cloud platforms. Here we look at the three most surprising findings from the survey.

MSPs Remain Undaunted by the Economy

The last time we published this survey, in 2022, the post-pandemic economic boom was still in full swing. The global market for IT and business services grew at its fastest rate ever in 2021 at 29%, according to industry research firm Information Services Group (ISG), and was poised for continued expansion in 2022. Two years later, growth forecasts are much more muted, with the July ISG Index forecasting just 2% growth for managed services and 14% growth for XaaS (anything as a service) for the rest of 2024. That compares to 5.1% for MSPs and 20% for XaaS the last time we published this survey report.

You would think those numbers would translate to diminished optimism for the MSPs in this year’s survey. But instead, 60% of survey respondents told us they expected their business to grow substantially—by more than 10%--in 2024. In 2022, just 46% of survey respondents were that bullish about growth, with almost as many—44%--pegging growth in the more conservative 2 to 9% range.

We can think of a lot of reasons for this optimism: inflation is stabilizing; the boom-and-bust cycle of the post-pandemic economy is settling into a more consistent growth pattern; and perhaps most importantly, cloud and AI investments continue to rise, and organizations need more help than ever from MSPs to help them get the most out of those investments.
Multi-cloud Becomes a Little Less Multi

The multi-cloud revolution was in full swing in our 2022 survey. We asked our survey respondents which cloud platforms their clients were migrating to. Google Cloud Platform had displaced traditional market leader Amazon Web Services on top of the leaderboard. Second-tier cloud platforms like IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud and Alibaba Cloud all drew some interest as well.

This year’s survey showed more consolidation in cloud platforms. Not only did AWS flipflop with GCP but interest in IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud and Alibaba Cloud dropped significantly.

While organizations continue to embrace multi-cloud and spread their workloads around to different public clouds, AWS has the most market share of any public cloud hyperscaler in every study we’ve seen and has re-emerged as the top destination for cloud migrations in our study. If MSPs’ clients had shown an interest in experimenting with different clouds two years ago, they’ve shown an inclination to come home to AWS this year and consolidate cloud platforms.
Tool Sprawl is Getting Worse for MSPs

MSPs told us throughout the survey that they were looking to become more efficient in their operations. One area where they still have room for improvement is in the number of tools they use to monitor and manage their customers’ IT environments. The problem has only gotten worse since our 2022 survey report. The percentage of survey respondents with 20 or more IT monitoring and management tools more than doubled from 7 to 16. While the “sweet spot” of five to nine tools dropped from 45 to 36%.

Use of point tools was the chief culprit with 77% of respondents indicated that they used domain-specific IT infrastructure monitoring tools, siloes be damned. Another 71% of respondents told us they used analysis of observability data to detect production issues or IT outages that impact user experience and business service performance. If there’s a silver lining, better use of observability tools can help MSPs get ahead of their clients’ performance issues and perhaps retire some of those point tools, leading to more efficiency and better business outcomes for all.