Kaseya Survey: Many MSPs Identifying by Vertical Specialty
Kaseya, the IT infrastructure management solution provider, on Thursday released the results of its 2019 MSP Benchmark Survey. The eighth annual survey focuses on Kaseya partners that have achieved average annual monthly recurring revenue (MRR) growth over 20 percent, which it calls its “Bionic MSPs.”
There’s nothing in the report that will shock channel professionals, but the data does give a more nuanced perspective into the business of managed service providers (MSPs). It examines how trends like managed hybrid and multicloud environments, security concerns and the need for backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solutions are impacting providers’ search for high-margin ways to deliver infrastructure.
Taunia Kipp, global EVP of Kaseya IT management solutions, says the first thing that struck her about this year’s respondents was how many self-identified as a vertical-specific IT solutions provider rather than as an MSP.
“Instead of identifying themselves as an MSP, if perhaps they tend to serve the health-care market, they might identify themselves as health care IT provider instead of as an MSP,” says Kipp. “We saw that in our registrations for the Connect conference too … they might identify themselves as an SMB [or] health care or education [provider] or something like that, when really we look at the data and we’re like, ‘Wait a minute, they’re actually a managed service provider.'”
This falls in line with some of the survey findings, which say that many MSPs are scaling up cloud services for customer segments that match their expertise and experience, and as a result, enjoying a margin range almost double that of MSPs overall.
We sat down with Jim Lippie, general manager of cloud computing at Kaseya, to dig deeper into the 2019 findings.
Channel Futures: One of the highlights from this year’s survey is that “bigger doesn’t mean better” in terms of MSP size, and that a third of your fastest growing MSPs have fewer than 10 employees. What advantages does a smaller shop have in the market?
Jim Lippie: I’m aware of a number of MSPs that are in the 10-employee range and are highly profitable. They can leverage automation to generate higher profit margins than an MSP that has a lot more employees … It’s not about the number of employees. It’s about how you …
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