Small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) in the United States will be spending $7 billion on managed services in 2011, according to Techaisle. Growth will be in double digits over the next several years as well. At the moment, most of those services are related to IT infrastructure, rather than applications, but one would assume that will shift, over time. Managed Services Spending Set To Boom
The survey of 2000 SMBs and 600 channel partners in America also suggests that, as a percent of support and maintenance (known as break-fix), US-based SMB managed services’ spend will increase from 27 percent in 2011 to 40 percent in 2015. More than one in five small businesses (companies with 1-99 employees) use some type of managed services with greatest use observed among businesses with 50-99 employees.
Another percent of small businesses plan to use managed services suggesting robust opportunities for MSPs (managed services providers). Of the U.S. medium businesses (100-999 employees), 65 percent are using one or more managed services.
It also would be reasonable to expect some shifts in the IT services ecosystem, with MSPs displacing traditional “master distributors” to a greater or lesser extent. Ecosystem to shift
Managed services, one would assume, also will be more important for a variety of applications as computing shifts inexorably towards mobile and cloud-based mechanisms.