Charles Weaver's blog

I sat in on a webinar this morning announcing Nimsoft's Unified Monitoring vision for MSPs. This is something I predict will spread to other MSPs very quickly and should become the standard regarding remote IT monitoring. 

We are anticipating a great event this November. Interested in knowing who might be at the event? Here is a partial list of MSPWorld attendees. 

3X Systems

While the last few years have seen many of the SMB focused MSPs attend MSPAlliance events, this year we are seeing a new trend towards larger, more mature MSPs. There are still quite a few MSPs focused on the SMB market who will be in attendance this November in Las Vegas, but the increase of larger MSPs has been interesting to watch. What is accounting for this? 

I'm eagerly awaiting MSPWorld London to see how the European members have been faring. Having just come from Australia where the MSPs there are not only surviving the global recession (which hasn't affected Australia) but they are seeing solid growth in managed services spending. 

Another vendor jumps headfirst into the Managed IT Services industry this week as Xerox announced it would acquire IT outsourcing giant ACS for $6.4 billion. This acquisition is right on the heels of Dell's acquisition of Perot Systems and the McAfee acquisition of MX Logic. Three vendors buying three service providers. What does it all mean? 

In a deal that is sure to create a lot of buzz in the IT channel, Dell today announced that it would purchase Perot Systems for $3.9 billion. This move has wider implications for the managed services profession.

A report by AMI Partners predicted that as EMEA small and medium sized businesses continued to face pressures from the global economy they would attempt to find relief from those pressures through managed IT services. The study reported spending on managed Information and Communication Technology managed services would grow at a compound annual growth rate of 24% over the next 5 years. 

MSP's from all over Australia and New Zealand today converged in downtown Sydney to discuss managed services.

We had a MSPAlliance board call this morning and I thought I'd pass along a bit of feedback I heard. I asked a few of the members what their expectations were for the 2nd part of 2009; did they expect anything different from what they saw in the first half?