How Big is the Managed Services Provider Market?

Just how big is the IT service provider market? It’s a question that we get asked from time to time, and while no one has a really definitive answer in the fast moving managed services space, we can certainly make some educated guesses.

For instance, TechNavio, a market analyst firm, recently released a report looking at the size and growth rates of the IT Service Management market. This firm has forecast the market to grow at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 7.3 percent between 2012 and 2016. It identifies key vendors as BMC Software, CA Technologies, IBM, and HP (although I’m not sure that MSPs would say that all of these vendors offer platforms they can use to manage multiple clients’ infrastructures.)

A MarketsandMarkets report in August was forecasting a CAGR of 12.4 percent through 2018 for a market that it defined as including managed data center, managed network, managed information, managed mobility, managed infrastructure, managed communications, and managed security.

And our own MSPmentor 100 2012 research showed an increase in total annual recurring revenues for our top 100 MSPs of 28 percent from 2011 to 2012. (Have you filled out the 2013 survey yet? It just opened up.)

And then there’s my back of envelope calculations looking at some of the big remote monitoring and management vendors’ published the following information about the number of MSP partners they have:

I couldn’t find a recent partner number published by Kaseya, which was acquired by Insight Venture Partners this year, but the company pointed out in a blog post this year that our MSPmentor 100 survey found that 51 of the top 100 MSPs used Kaseya for RMM.

(Have I missed any of the big players here for RMM? Please let me know. You also may notice that I haven’t actually made an educated guess about total market size. But you can certainly extrapolate your own very rough guess from this information, especially if you download our MSPmentor 100 report.)

All of this makes me even more excited about the research we are gathering now for the MSPmentor 100 and MSPmentor 501 reports that will be released in February 2014. Given all the acquisitions in the RMM platform market, it’s going to be interesting to see if and how the market has shifted.