We’ve already seen the RMM platform companies experience a wave of merger and acquisition activity, and the managed service providers have also seen their share of M&A transactions over the last few years. So, the question becomes, when will other MSP enabling technology sectors experience their M&A moment?
I’ve written about my thoughts on the PSA companies and M&A, but I’m thinking that the time is not far off before we see some acquisitions hit the storage, backup/recovery companies. Here are my thoughts.
- Just like the RMM & PSA companies, storage vendors need to innovate, and fast. One of the best ways to achieve rapid accelerating of growth and R&D is through investment and M&A.
- Market penetration has long been a problem for MSP and channel focused tech companies. Marketing and sales costs have increased, both due to the changing channel as well as the proliferation of companies calling themselves MSPs. As a result, channel vendors (including storage) have found it increasingly difficulty to select good MSPs from the bad ones.
- Cloud pressures, primarily coming from the backlash to public cloud snooping by the US government, are already causing some to claim cloud computing could lose up to $35 billion in revenue over the next three years. With such a proliferation of cloud and backup vendors out there in the channel, opportunities abound for other vendors to add backup to their portfolio of technical capabilities.
There are a lot of really good storage vendors who do a lot of great things for their MSPs. A few of them will be attending MSPWorld this Fall. While innovation in storage really should come from the MSP (i.e., private cloud), the abundance of storage vendors will likely not last for too long.