Foretelling
The
Future
First Distribution’s Cloud and Hosting Business Unit Manager, Kevin
Derman, gazes into his crystal ball
and forsees five major trends for
the MSP Market for 2014.
s it gets towards the end of the year, one always
tends to start to take stock of your business performance over the previous 12 months. Did the plans
and opportunities evolve as you thought they would? Did
we miss any opportunities that we should have seen when
we planned at the start of the year? At the same time, it’s a
great opportunity to think about the year ahead. Where will
the opportunities be, and are we adequately geared in order
to take advantage of them?
A
3.
With this in mind, I put my thinking cap on, and came up
with what I consider to be a list of the top five trends which
we will see for Managed Service Providers for 2014.
4.
Local is Still Lekker
Local MSPs will continue to see growth and dominate the
share of enterprise services in our market. The reason
behind this is the fear, the lack of understanding of regulations involving data sovereignty, the POPI act and the high
bandwidth costs we still have in our country. MSPs should
capitalise on this window of opportunity to gain customers
and delight them with their service offerings.
Specialisation and Consolidation
Fuelled by a continued move from CAPEX to OPEX, the
consumer’s drive for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and
by a proliferation of offerings designed for the MSP market,
my prediction is that we will continue to see growth rates
in excess of 20% in this segment of the market. Microsoft
has stated that their SPLA licensing model is growing at five
times the rate of their Open License model, demonstrating
the trend towards this licensing model.
MSPs need to continue to evolve their businesses to stay
ahead of the curve. It is no longer an option to build your
offering only on a hosted mail solution or hosted CRM
platform. Customers are now demanding a menu of options
to suit their business needs. Flexibility and agility in this
market will be rewarded with longevity. Dealing with multiple
companies for multiple solutions requires energy and additional cost, and hence there will be a strong move away
from the multiple partner strategy. Those who do not evolve
will most likely be acquired, as there is much value in their
customer base, presenting a lower cost of acquisition for
these customers.
2.
5.
1. Growth
Demystification of the Cloud
Forbes recently stated that when people were asked what
‘The Cloud’ is, only 16% could adequately explain the
concept. This is not surprising, as ‘Cloud’ is not a re ????????)??????????????????????????????????????????????)????????????????????????????????????????????????+?a
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