10. Solution Providers Will Invest Heavily To Achieve Automation, AI Mastery

Solution providers, distributors and vendors alike are turning to artificial intelligence and automation to streamline routine processes, reduce data center downtime and sell multi-sourced cloud offerings.

CompuCom, No. 23 on the 2014 CRN Solution Provider 500, launched in July what it said was the first-ever artificial intelligence (AI)-based managed service aimed at preventing midmarket data center downtime. The new offering runs on Amazon Web Services and uses machine learning and cognitive computing to uncover IT problems and quickly remediate them.

Kaseya released a platform in September that allows its users to buy and sell the scripts, reports, templates and agent procedures needed to automate processes. This will help MSPs better allocate their resources by having staff do things that automated procedures can't address on their own.

And Ingram Micro launched an automated offering in April that enables partners to sell both distributor-sourced and vendor-sourced cloud offerings off a single platform. The on-premises software needed to do this can be configured in less than five hours and runs on a single solution provider server.