More companies choose to outsource their IT operations, according to the experts who attended last week’s the N-able Partner Summit.  Founder and president Gavin Garbutt said in his opening keynote that 10 to 20 percent of SMBs are using managed services, a percentage that he believes is on the rise.

Bill Boisvenue, the president of the Toronto-based BSC Solutions Group, made a very similar observation at the event. Boisvenue says that in recent years his company caved in to the demand from small to medium businesses, and now BSC is going after the businesses that were once considered “too small for his company to serve effectively.”

New technologies are playing a big role in this trend. According to Jim Lippi, who represented Thrive Networks at the event, 70 percent of his MSP’s prospects are looking to get invested in the cloud.  And the overwhelming majority of the executives who tuned into Garbutt’s opening address said their company is “doing something with virtualization.” These two trends have a significant services component.

The N-Able Partner Summit provided a few other interesting insights as well, namely the fact that competition is getting fiercer.

“Lippie said another concern is increased competition, often from partners seeking to take customers previously served through MSPs and make them direct customers. “Today we have competitors that used to be our partners,” he said. “I think the channel’s getting squeezed.”

Garbutt in turn made a point of a different kind of squeeze:  clients’ bad experiences with providers who are all talk, but no action.  MSPs to meet customers’ expectation cause a backlash that affects the industry as a whole, but he predicts that their numbers will thin in the coming years. He added that one N-able partner is aiming for 50 acquisitions this year.

HR was also a central topic. MSPs prefer to recruit from competitors, but will “take on” hires from internal IT departments.