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3 Enterprise IT Factors That Will Make MSPs More Successful in 2022

Dennis Callaghan
OpsRamp

A new study by OpsRamp on the state of the Managed Service Providers (MSP) market 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.

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 survey shows that MSPs are bullish on growth, both for their own businesses and in the economy as a whole. 85% of survey respondents are either extremely positive (39%) or somewhat positive (46%) about growth prospects in 2022.

One reason for this optimism could be that businesses will keep investing in technology to stay ahead of their competitors, especially as digital transformation accelerates in the wake of the pandemic. And most organizations will need outside help (from service providers) to keep their IT environments and services humming smoothly, especially as the Great Resignation takes its toll on internal staffing.

MSPs aren't just bullish about overall economic growth. They believe this will translate into an expansion of their own businesses. Nearly half of respondents (46%) expect their managed services business to grow more than 10% this year, with another 44% expecting growth rates of between 2 and 9%. Just 7% expect their managed services business to flatline in 2022 and only 3% expect to see a decline in revenue. 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 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.

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.

MSPs are competing in a growing but challenging market for managed IT services. While customers are prepared to spend more money for the right services, their needs are growing increasingly complex along with their IT environments.

Dennis Callaghan is a Senior Content Marketing Manager at OpsRamp

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3 Enterprise IT Factors That Will Make MSPs More Successful in 2022

Dennis Callaghan
OpsRamp

A new study by OpsRamp on the state of the Managed Service Providers (MSP) market 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.

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 survey shows that MSPs are bullish on growth, both for their own businesses and in the economy as a whole. 85% of survey respondents are either extremely positive (39%) or somewhat positive (46%) about growth prospects in 2022.

One reason for this optimism could be that businesses will keep investing in technology to stay ahead of their competitors, especially as digital transformation accelerates in the wake of the pandemic. And most organizations will need outside help (from service providers) to keep their IT environments and services humming smoothly, especially as the Great Resignation takes its toll on internal staffing.

MSPs aren't just bullish about overall economic growth. They believe this will translate into an expansion of their own businesses. Nearly half of respondents (46%) expect their managed services business to grow more than 10% this year, with another 44% expecting growth rates of between 2 and 9%. Just 7% expect their managed services business to flatline in 2022 and only 3% expect to see a decline in revenue. 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 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.

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.

MSPs are competing in a growing but challenging market for managed IT services. While customers are prepared to spend more money for the right services, their needs are growing increasingly complex along with their IT environments.

Dennis Callaghan is a Senior Content Marketing Manager at OpsRamp

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...