Looking to expand its reach and capabilities in serving the managed services market, IT trade association CompTIA announced plans Wednesday to acquire a counterpart association, MSP Partners.

CompTIA officials characterized the deal, for which financial terms were not disclosed, as just the latest piece of a broader effort to engage with other organizations serving the channel. The Illinois-based nonprofit association has spent the last year actively pursuing industry partnerships and recruiting new vendor, distributor and solution provider members, all with the aim of pursuing long-term growth, according to Todd Thibodeau, CompTIA president and CEO.

“We’re fulfilling this mission by creating a series of robust vendor-neutral communities for the IT channel,” Thibodeau said. “The addition of MSP Partners to our managed services community positions us as the leading voice for managed services.”

Established in 2007, MSP Partners provides education, training, events and other resources to its now stable of 5,000 MSP members. The association originally was founded by an alliance of vendor sponsors -- Level Platforms, Cisco, Intel, Ingram and Microsoft – to promote awareness, enablement and adoption of the managed services business model in the channel. MSP Partners’ President Jim Hamilton will join the CompTIA team to drive managed services activities for the entire group.

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Hamilton said that under the CompTIA umbrella, managed services offerings will only be strengthened. MSP Partners’ events, education and research will continue to be provided to its membership, along with the additional resources gained in the CompTIA deal.

“We’ll be able to develop the preeminent community for the managed services market, featuring valuable business solutions, research, networking and discussion forums, and continuing education,” he said.

Not all the logistics of the deal, which remains subject to closing conditions, have been ironed out. For one, how membership transition will unfold is still being assessed, CompTIA officials told Channel Insider. Some overlap exists between the two memberships, though the exact number has not been fully determined yet. The ultimate goal, CompTIA said, is to transition as many discrete MSP Partners members over to CompTIA as possible.

To that end, CompTIA plans outreach to every MSP Partners member as well as the organization’s now-40 vendor sponsors in the coming weeks, officials said.