Jay McBain from Canalys shared some new data from their research on the growth of the MSP tool vendors. I’ll share his post.
As a potential bellwether to the slowing MSP market, PSA and RMM platform vendors have dropped into high single-digit growth for the first time in memory. (Note: we still separate the Datto and Kaseya brands for purposes of y/y comparison).
Connectwise: 24.2% market share, 6.1% growth year over year
N-able: 16.2% market share, 6.6% growth year over year
Kaseya: 7.7% market share, 9.2% growth year over year
Datto: 7.6% market share, 9.4% growth year over year
Others: 44.3% market share, 10.1% growth year over year
TOTAL: 8.5% growth year over year
Other notable industry analysis by my colleague Robin Ody:
- Cost cutting underway driven by PE-backed boards. 2023 Budgets reduced and key personnel layoffs.
- End customer demand still robust across managed services and cybersecurity.
- RMM 3.0 is high on the agenda, with ConnectWise’s integration of ChatGPT (OpenAI) into the Asio platform as one example of the automation possibilities.
- N-able and Kaseya announced broader distribution agreements and global expansion initiatives.
- Kaseya is losing (some) partners post-acquisition of Datto – although growth numbers remain best in class. We are hearing from partners moving to NinjaOne, Syncro, Atera and SuperOps.ai
Why do we care?
Jay is indicating this is a potential to slow in the MSP market – I’d argue it’s a slowdown in the MSP tools market. Why? Because the core product of these companies is a zombie – dead product walking.
It’s not surprising that yesterday’s toolset driven by private equity investment strategies is not the wave of the future. Instead, let’s consider a cluster of companies more like Acronis, with a security-focused management platform; or Nerdio, with a cloud-based management platform; Auvik, with a network-focused management platform; or ScalePad, with a configuration-based management platform. And speaking of ScalePad…..