MSPs must master multi-cloud says IDC

Analyst firm IDC has offered some guidance to cloud-centric managed services providers (MSPs), and the guts of it is to master multi-cloud or risk irrelevance as buyers sprawl across clouds at the same time they look to reduce the number of service providers with which they engage.

That conclusion was offered in the analyst firm’s new worldwide Managed CloudView 2019 study which surveyed 1,500 organisations with 1,000 or more employees whether or not they use MSPs.

IDC pulled out the following five items as key findings.

1. Changing buyer view in roles of managed SPs and hyperscalers. Enterprise expectations of managed SPs and hyperscaler partners (public cloud providers) are changing with a view of managed SPs as meeting transformation, strategy, and multicloud requirements and public cloud providers as becoming more "strategic" partners meeting critical cloud service needs (e.g. easy to integrate, availability, rapid provisioning of applications etc.)
2. Shift in sourcing strategies toward public cloud providers. Firms expect that they will look to increase the number of public cloud providers they use in the future while 68% of firms worldwide will consolidate their portfolio of managed SPs.
3. Need to support innovation using PaaS capabilities. Enterprises indicate significant use of managed SPs to support innovative capabilities involving development of cloud-native applications and use of open source and containers with PaaS (platform as a service) reaching upwards of 50% of enterprise application portfolios by 2024.
4. Premiums for certified use of public clouds. Nearly all enterprises indicate willingness to pay a premium for using managed cloud services for public clouds that are certified by the public cloud provider, with 32% of firms willing to pay a premium from 21-40% and 28% from 41-60%.
5. Preference for cloud business model in provisioning managed cloud services. Firms expect managed SPs to utilize the business model of public cloud/SaaS providers with 82% indicating a need for managed SPs to own their own cloud platform to be successful and 94% indicating that managed SPs need to offer SaaS capabilities.

David Tapper, IDC’s vice president for outsourcing and managed cloud services, said the research found “a combination of changing customer perceptions and expectations, technological innovation, and pressures emerging from coopetition between managed SPs and their ecosystem partners of hyperscalers appear to be creating a tipping point for which managed SPs need to clearly assess their market position and what their long-term roles will be in optimizing their opportunities for managed cloud services."