We recently spoke with Charles Weaver, president of the MSPAlliance about his observations on the evolutionary trends in the SMB market. The MSPAlliance is a professional association and accrediting body for the managed services industry. According to Weaver, VoIP and unified communications are at the heart of managed services growth - whether the managed services provider is offering a hosted VoIP or a premise-based VoIP solution. Noting that MSPs can either become the enterprise's fully outsourced IT department or simply work with the IT team, Weaver attributes the growth of MSPs to the availability of management tools and platforms that are much more effective today than they were five years ago.

Most of MSPAlliance members are focused on the 20-user and above business, and very few own their own access network, thus members take a different view from telcos which tend to be more about large scale and generic services. Weaver said that value-added resellers (VAR) are increasingly evolving “by the thousands” to become MSPs as they seek to counter shrinking products margins from traditional equipment sales. According to Weaver, the three biggest trends affecting MSPs in the SMB market are:

1. Green IT: Using managed services to improve the environment, especially with “green” data centers.
2. Security: Looking beyond standard network security to record archiving, including accounting for the control and use of records.
3. Managed VoIP: Hardware and software management tools are evolving to help the SMB and the MSP better manage VoIP and unified communications.

Finally, we asked Weaver why MSPs need an alliance. He said: “We provide education, a safe place to discuss industry topics of note, and also join for the distinction of business and technology accreditation. That also benefits the customer [as] there is virtually no regulation of MSPs. Because MSPs have access to so much infrastructure and data, there should be technology guidelines and a code of ethics. The industry needs basic ground rules.”

Our thanks to Mr. Weaver for his views and observations.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.