Acquisition Heralds Coming of Expanding MSP Opportunities

There are some profound changes taking place among small-to-medium business (SMB) customers that are just now starting to serve as a catalyst for a wave of mergers and acquisitions.

But perhaps the biggest change is that SMB organizations are more dependent on their Web sites to transact business more than ever. That means the technologies they are investing in are becoming more sophisticated, which is also at the root of the second big change taking place. That issue leads to the second big change, which is the simple fact that the overall IT environment is becoming more complex to manage. In fact, there is no correlation anymore between the size of the company and the actual amount of IT resources being consumed.

For a lot of vendors all this change spells opportunity, which is one of the primary reasons that this week saw the acquisition of Montis, a provider of cloud-based network and systems monitoring tools, by GFI Software, a provider of backup, archiving, networking and security software that is sold mostly through the channel.

According to Alistair Forbes, general manager of GFI MAX at GFI Software, the changing dynamics of the SMB market are pushing GFI Software towards filling out the company’s portfolio with a broader set of managed service offerings in the cloud that will all be designed to help SMB customers reduce the cost of managing IT environments that have become increasingly complex with the rise of virtualization.

Although the channel has been patiently waiting for the demand of managed services to expand in the SMB sector, it looks like a confluence of business and technology trends is finally going to bring that opportunity to fruition. But like most overnight success stories that in reality have been 10 years or more in the making, the patience that solution providers have exercised in all that time looks like it might finally be ready to pay off.