There is no doubt that MSPs are experiencing a significant surge in customer activity as we progress through this 3rd quarter of 2020. What started as a substantial downturn across many market sectors (managed services being the exception) at the beginning of the year has now turned into a massive rush to re-open businesses and re-orient business models to deal with a global pandemic.

Part of the unique nature of the MSPAlliance is that we can collect a lot of information about the MSP market globally in a fast amount of time. Our members are MSPs, so it is relatively easy for us to communicate with them and generate a quick and accurate assessment of how they are doing across a broad spectrum of services, markets, and geographic verticals.

While this may not be scientifically precise, it does represent an excellent understanding of how MSP sentiment, particularly their views about the future. Right now, MSPs seem to be rather bullish about the future of their profession. Will that sentiment continue? Let’s take a closer look.

MSPs Staying Busy

At the moment, MSPs are staying quite busy. Across the membership, MSPs are reporting a noticeable uptick in activity from existing clients. From back to school to business re-openings, there is plenty to keep MSPs busy as most organizations must now rely on some form of IT to remain viable in a pandemic society.

MSPs were busy at the outset of the pandemic shutdown and then stabilized their activity for the remainder of the 2nd quarter. But, as cities and countries began to re-open, economists predicted that Q3 and Q4 would be surprisingly active. I believe the economists were right.

We do not currently know what new client acquisition looks like since the re-opening, but MSPs have likely been adding to their customer base. After all, the average break-fix providers are ill-equipped to handle ongoing and scalable IT support of the kind businesses that need to rapidly deploy, support, and secure, remote workers.

Break-Fix Fallout

While we do have anecdotal evidence that reactive IT providers were disrupted at the beginning of the pandemic, we do not know whether that disruption has been widespread or how significant it was. Time will tell.

What we do know is that MSPs remained busy throughout the Spring and have now gone into hyper-accelerated growth to keep up with demand. Much of this growth has been in the form of maximizing scalability and process efficiencies. These are, after all, the questions we receive from MSPs around the globe.

For the time being, we expect Q3 of 2020 to be the best quarter of the year (5.4% GDP). As the economists have predicted, Q4 will be experience growth (2.5% GDP) but less growth than Q3.

The longer-term questions about how the pandemic and the associated economic shutdowns have impacted the global economies are still not fully known. We know that MSPs are working hard to keep the world businesses running smoothly and safely. For that, I am thankful.