'Challenging Results' for MSPs in Channel Futures' Exclusive Quarterly Survey

2020 was overwhelming as businesses struggled to keep their ships afloat. Now that we’re slowly emerging from the cluster that was COVID-19, organizations are adopting new technologies to adapt to the changing landscape. We wanted to know what those patterns look like, where profit outlooks stand, and the challenges partners still face.

Getting a Sense of the Industry with Our Benchmark Survey

Channel Futures recently launched a benchmark survey to get a pulse of the top trends and opportunities in the industry during the first quarter of 2021. 

We mentioned in our last article that the results highlight an emphasis on security, and encouraging upticks in recurring revenue. We decided to take a deeper dive into some of the more intriguing data points. What we found gives a really good indication of the health and outlook of the industry. 

In particular, in terms of recurring revenue, it’s a tale of two cities. Half of the respondents grew while half were flat or declined.

Challenging Results

Forrester’s Jay McBain

“Compared to cloud hyperscalers – Azure, Google Cloud Platform, AWS – that are growing 50% year over year and large SaaS companies – Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, etc. – growing at 30%, these are challenging results,” said Jay McBain, principal analyst of channels, partnerships and ecosystems at Forrester Research. “As the economy starts to open up, more companies announce back-to-work plans, managed services growing given the remote topology, and as major hardware vendors – Dell, Cisco, HPE, IBM, etc. – start the push into subscription/consumption models, I would expect these numbers to be significantly higher in future surveys.”

The results for the first quarter may have been challenging, yes. But, there is cautious optimism for the rest of the year. More and more, providers are willing to invest and plan for technology shifts. Because of this, we might indeed see higher numbers in future surveys.

In the slideshow above, we further break down our important benchmark survey findings. What will we discover as we head into the next quarter and beyond?