A Look at the Soaring Managed Service Provider Market

Analyst house, Gartner, recently released their 2018 Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, which we covered here. This report emphasized the importance of a managed service provider (MSP) can give a company wanting to optimize their cloud. It’s difficult for many enterprises to manage a nuanced cloud infrastructure without the help of an MSP. Thus, this market is growing quickly.

This report offered more than just coverage of the vendors in this space, it discussed the growing managed service provider market. Getting the most out of a cloud infrastructure, like AWS or Azure, is a responsibility that should not be overlooked. Gartner recognizes this and goes into detail about the extensive marketplace.

This market is not yet mature, as many vendors have only begun offering these services within the last five years. However, it is experiencing dramatic growth as cloud infrastructures become more complex, and enterprises are looking to do more with IT.

Optimize your cloud

Most companies can’t afford the high-end talent required to manage a public cloud infrastructure in-house. Managed service providers essentially eliminate the need for a personally managed cloud, and each provider comes with their own strengths. An MSP helps create a simpler cloud where your developers and operations teams can thrive.

Automation options

Automation is driving the IT landscape forward. This is certainly the case for MSPs. Proper automation can drive down the cost of a hyperscale cloud infrastructure provider, as your workloads will be more optimized. MSPs can provide personalized automation based on your needs and your cloud platform. However, this varies tremendously based on cloud infrastructure provider.

Gartner notes that AWS and GCP both tend to prefer an automation DevOps approach. This comes from a customer preference. Customers using Azure tend to prefer a more manual approach. MSPs need to match these customer needs and being a cloud partner emphasizes MSP flexibility.

Multi-cloud

Many companies are choosing to utilize multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments. This is a great way to optimize cloud workloads, but does that mean you’ll need a second MSP? Not necessarily, many MSPs have attained a partner status with multiple cloud providers. For example, Accenture is a premier/gold partner for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Despite having multiple options, most MSPs offer true multi-cloud options. This is due to MSPs having different specific offerings. Despite being partnered with multiple cloud providers, MSPs do have their niches. Cloud users that benefit from multi-cloud aren’t working on the same apps across these clouds, they’re using different clouds to optimize different workloads. The same goes for MSPs. Many multi-cloud users have utilized multiple MSPs for their different clouds.

The market is growing

MSPs are a relatively new phenomenon. Gartner says there has been a sizable increase in demand for their services in the past year. The number of vendors listed on the Magic Quadrant has more than doubled since last year. Gartner points out that traditional hosting, managed services, and DCO businesses are moving towards MSP solutions. The cloud market is disrupting these traditional offerings, so the cloud is the most logical step for them.