Cloud, Root Cause Analysis and Automation Will Drive Both New Opportunities and Challenges
OpsRamp, the digital operations management leader for managed service providers, has released the results of a new study on how the Managed Service Providers (MSP) market will be shaped by changing business conditions and technology adoption, at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, co-located with MSP Summit, here today. The study concludes that MSPs face a market of bountiful opportunities, but must prepare for this growth by embracing complex technologies like hybrid cloud management, root cause analysis and automation.
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The OpsRamp 2022 State of the Market for MSPs in IT Operations study, which was conducted in February by a third party research firm, includes input from 211 respondents who work at the general manager, director or vice president level at MSPs in North America or Europe. All respondents are involved in selecting or recommending IT monitoring and management tools, and work at firms with at least $25 million in annual managed services revenue.
The global market for IT and business services grew at its fastest rate ever in 2021, according to industry research firm Information Services Group (ISG), while Gartner forecasts growth of nearly 8% for the IT services market in 2022 vs. 5% for the IT industry as a whole. With digital transformation initiatives accelerating in the wake of the pandemic even as internal IT departments wrestle with the Great Resignation, 2022 is shaping up to be another banner year for MSPs. The OpsRamp study shows that MSPs are bullish on growth, both for their own businesses and in the economy as a whole. But that doesn’t mean that complex IT problems will get any easier to solve.
Root Cause Analysis Both a Challenge and Opportunity
One of those complex IT problems is finding the root cause of IT performance issues. The OpsRamp survey indicated that faster root cause analysis was both the top IT monitoring challenge faced by MSPs, cited by 46% of respondents, as well as the No. 1 AIOps capability critical to winning deals, cited by 48% of respondents.
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It’s About the Cloud, and the Network
We asked MSPs to name just one technology that would get the most traction in 2022. Managed cloud services and managed network services tied for the top spot, each garnering 20% of responses, outpacing managed security services, at 16%. IT infrastructure monitoring was the clear winner for the most critical technology needed to manage delivery of those services, selected by 55% of respondents, followed by network performance monitoring at 47%.
Don’t Just Monitor, Automate!
While monitoring is critical for service delivery management, MSPs are looking to do more than just keep an eye on service performance. More than half of all respondents cited the ability to automate routine tasks as the monitoring capability that was most critical to winning deals. Nearly half cited hybrid monitoring as the most critical monitoring capability as MSPs’ manage workloads running both in the cloud and on-premises. They need monitoring tools that can handle both, as well as automate configuration changes and IT processes.
“The study shows that MSPs are dealing with some of the most complex challenges in IT management today,” said Varma Kunaparaju, OpsRamp’s CEO. “As digital transformation accelerates and the hybrid estate grows, MSPs need to be able to consolidate their monitoring tools, apply machine learning to their monitoring data to get to the root cause of performance issues faster, and automate their responses to those performance issues in order to lower mean time to remediation and improve the service levels they deliver to their clients.”
Download the full report, Three Factors That Will Make MSPs Successful in 2022, here. Or visit our conference booths in Vegas for a free printed copy of the report. We’ll be at booth 25 at MSP Summit and at booth 2421 at Channel Partner Expo.
