Original post on MSP Today
There is a reason why the MSP industry continues to grow faster than nearly every other segment in technology and telecom – it is called the cloud. The Managed Service Providers that made the leap to the cloud early are growing at a rapid pace, replacing what used to be called “IT Outsourcing.” Small, medium, and large MSPs are in a great position to attract customers and serve them far better and for far less money and risk than the classic, traditional “outsourcers” that had the means to build massive, shared infrastructure.
MSPs don’t need to make operating expense investments. They have access to Azure, AWS, Google Public Cloud, and other public clouds, and more open networks running virtual machines (with NFV) and hundreds of cloud-native software solutions that address everything from cybersecurity to application performance optimization and from CRM to ERP, and everything in between.
With increasing access to cloud marketplaces, MSPs are also able to find, procure, and manage everything their customers need to remain competitive and “digitally transformed.” It explains in part why 2022, despite challenging economic uncertainty and disruption, saw global IT spending increase by almost one percent or $4.4 trillion. IT services (which is the category most accurately encompassing the managed services market) grew by over 4%, or $1.2 trillion, according to Gartner.
Looking ahead, 2023 looks much better than 2022 did, Gartner also said, with global IT spending projected to pass $4.6 trillion (5.1% growth) and global IT services projected to surpass $1.3 trillion (or nearly 8% growth).
Large, global MSP ConnX, an innovative multiservice communication platform integrator and managed service provider, and Nectar Services Corp., a provider of actionable insights for the cloud collaboration and contact center markets, this week announced the availability of an advanced edge experience assurance solution. The collaborative efforts ensures every voice and collaboration interaction is excellent on every endpoint and every step of the way, tackling new and pressing needs at the edge of the cloud – right down to every device.
ConnX has been managing large enterprise networks in the retail, manufacturing, healthcare, government, and financial services sectors for nearly three decades, and its extremely popular ConnX Virtual Edge (CVE) has been in place and serving Fortune 500 companies as real-time communications and collaboration shifted dramatically to the cloud.
Nectar’s market-leading software solutions, delivered as a service in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid model, are embedded into the ConnX AI Active Assurance offering. Nectar brings to the collaboration dynamic geospatial dashboards, which provide location-based views of usage and user experience metrics that enable IT support and managed services teams to drill down on individual users, locations, and sessions to troubleshoot issues quickly.
These user-based dashboards give ConnX managed services support teams full context into an individual user’s devices, client versions, and network connections with correlated insights and a real-time health assessment (powered by Nectar’s proprietary User Health Index) for fast troubleshooting. ConnX integrates Nectar’s solution into a broader partner ecosystem that simplifies the client experience and helps resolve issues with greater efficiency.
“ConnX has been working with Nectar for over ten years, collaborating with them through the rapid evolution from traditional infrastructure to cloud networking solutions,” said Jeff Li, Senior Director, Risk, Governance, Partners, and Projects at ConnX. “By bringing together two talented engineering teams around a common vision – to bring the highest quality real-time communications services to enterprise customers and contact center and CX providers at a level they’ve never seen before – we are dramatically improving how the ‘borderless enterprise’ can deliver consistently excellent interactions with their customers and partners. The pandemic caused us to work harder and faster than ever as the evolution to the cloud became a revolution, and together our offering addresses the hardest challenges.”
“Working with ConnX, we’ve been able to bring enterprises more visibility into private, public, and hybrid cloud UCaaS services,” said Steph Shaw, Strategic Alliance Manager, Nectar. “Our combination of strengths, including our great teams and common vision, make it possible to bring enterprises and departments insights their teams need. We are proud to enhance ConnX’s AI Active Assurance premium offerings and support their next-level AI SD-WAN capabilities.”
Nectar was founded on the idea that voice and video are a unique workload within IT, and over the years, it has proven its value in day-to-day telephony operations within many of the world’s largest organizations.
By instrumenting devices being used for everyday internal and external communications with additional software, the two companies have gone way beyond intelligent routing for quality and resiliency, advancing into software that validates and makes instantly visible controls associated with the management of every session.
The future is applying analytics to generate BI insights that have a direct impact on business outcomes, whether companies wish to grow revenues by improving customer experience or to improve profitability.
“We are very proud of our collective solution and grateful for the partnerships we have been blessed with as we have always been able to succeed when we can truly help leaders across the entire organization to drive increasingly positive business outcomes,” Li said.
ConnX is one of many MSPs Nectar works with, with both companies benefitting from the rising MSP tide. The global Managed Services Providers (MSP) market size was valued at $251 billion in 2022 and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 10.9% during the forecast period, reaching $467.5 Billion by 2028, according to one industry analyst firm.