• Competition from cloud providers has forced MSPs to reduce their service costs, with half of survey respondents reporting that they cut their costs "moderately" to acquire new customers, while 18 percent said they "substantially" reduced costs to bring in new customers;
• Security, pure cloud hosting and storage are the top three services MSPs plan to launch or expand in the next year. Sixty-seven percent plan to focus on security; 65 percent on pure cloud hosting and 58 percent on storage.
• Forty-five percent of respondents said that both business intelligence (BI) and storage have also served as large business drivers in the preceding 12 month.
• Fifty-one percent expect data analytics and BI to play a key role in delivering value.

Opal, of SWC, says the MSP world "is kind of moving to security, but I think it's going to be an interesting journey" for a partner to call itself an expert.

"I get the stance," he said. "I question where they all were in the journey."

Allen Falcon, CEO of Cumulus Global, a cloud solutions provider based in Westborough, Mass., said he's beginning to see some MSPs dipping their toes into such services as custom application development and workforce automation.

"Even ourselves, we're constantly looking for what other services we can bundle in so we can maximize not just the revenue but the margin," Falcon told ITBestOfBreed.

Begin, of Right Brain Networks, added that many companies are getting "extremely vertical," focusing on specific industries and solving specific problems.

"Gone are the days when you can make fat margins just kind of watching blinking lights in a data center someplace," Begin said.