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As businesses enter the fourth quarter with their sights set on closing deals and wrapping up annual forecasts, MSPs and other partners in the channel have their sights set on 2025. Channel Insider spoke with five solution providers, ranging in size, scope, solutions, and clients, to learn from them which technologies and offerings are dominating their planning conversations.

AI is the obvious choice, but readiness is still the focus for many end customers

No conversation around technology these days is complete without a mention of artificial intelligence, and more specifically, of the proliferation in the GenAI tools market that took place in 2024. Not all enterprises, though, are ready to jump fully into the technology come 2025.

“Data standardization is becoming extremely important, and we are constantly upskilling our team members to meet the demand,” said John Zemonek, the managing director at Aligned Technology Group.

“We are definitely seeing lots of questions and conversations around the use of AI, and we expect those to continue, but we’re not seeing that translate to investment yet,” said Tego CEO Nolan Smith.

XenTegra Practice Director of Modern Datacenter Philip Sellers said the team has led multiple educational webinars throughout the past year, and spent time talking about the security and data management steps that need to be taken to properly adopt AI. That work is starting to pay off, and 2025 might become the year AI is tangibly seen throughout IT operational plans and budgets.

“Our goal in 2025 is to make AI and GenAI a more streamlined offering to best support our clients through adoption,” said Sellers.

Service providers are also still helping their clients develop use cases and understand how GenAI tools can be measured for success in gains across efficiency and productivity.

“Organizations are either overly terrified or overly hyped about implementing AI. The reality is somewhere in between,” said Rob Fitzgerald, Field CISO at Blue Mantis. “Proper AI implementation requires careful consideration, preparation, and time.”

“Whoever gets out first and drives business value through outcomes will win in terms of AI adoption,” said EchoStor VP of Sales and Marketing Nick Sikorski.

Beyond GenAI, data resilience and backup recovery are also necessary

Sellers said his team is focused on the opportunity to build better backup and recovery systems for their clients. In the immediate aftermath of natural disasters like hurricane Helene and the CrowdStrike-caused Microsoft outage from July, more organizations are beginning to see the need to plan for disaster before it occurs.

“Events like the CrowdStrike outage plus weather really give us the opportunity to talk to clients about things like VDI and recovery options,” Sellers said, also noting that customers seem more willing to have these discussions now than in the past.

This, too, is a conversation largely about data in its various facets. This feeds into a growing need for MSPs to bring security and compliance back to the top of their clients minds, and budgets.

“Loosely following behind the AI demand, is data privacy and security compliance. Organizations have to realize that they need to prove they ‘walk the talk’ when it comes to cybersecurity and privacy,” Fitzgerald said.

2025 might be the year of going back to the basics

Among many conversations about emerging technologies is a growing focus on what Sikorski and others refer to as the “basics” of solution offerings that some organizations still do not have fully in place.

“In the rush to hybrid and remote capabilities during the pandemic, we sometimes neglected the attic and the basement,” Sikorski said.

“We’re helping our clients determine, ‘what does good look like,’” Zemonek said, emphasizing that “good” includes housekeeping conversations around legacy tech debt and security operations.

Indeed, the trending target in conversations around fundamentals is, unsurprisingly, security. As threats get more advanced, ransomware grows in frequency and severity, and new threat actors emerge every day, most organizations still don’t have their operations comfortably secure.

“We have become more strategic in the ways we go to market with our security and compliance offerings,” said Smith, many of whose clients are working within government defense contracts and need a strong regulatory understanding of their security frameworks.

Security is a wide net to cast, and tool fatigue is a real concern for both businesses and the solutions providers trying to bring the best value to their clients through offerings built to succeed.

Channel growth fueled by managed services, client relationships, and ongoing skills development

MSPs and others in the channel need to have a two-pronged approach to planning for the success of their clients and for their own success as a business in their own right. Here is what the providers interviewed in this piece are focused on internally in 2025.

“As a smaller partner, we have to work to maintain resource capability,” said Zemonek. ATG is focused entirely on AWS workloads and sees the AWS partner ecosystem on the cusp of even more growth in 2025.

“AWS is very partner-friendly right now,” Zemonek continued. “The secret to winning, I think, is in whoever can identify and achieve alignment in technology with use cases for our clients.”

EchoStor is well underway a years-long journey to expand geographically and in scope, with Sikorski pointing to a diversified client base as a key facet of their success. Now, the team will focus their attention on utilizing managed services offerings to push deeper into work with their clients.

“We have been told for years now, services, services, services, especially in terms of building margin, and now we’re looking at margin but within the scope of customer success,” Sikorski said. “We’re building really impactful service engagement.”

In 2024, Tego expanded their managed services offering following increased demand from existing clients to go beyond their traditional infrastructure expertise. Smith said he expects 2025 to continue that expansion, and said their first priority is always client satisfaction and success.

“We are going to continue to become more holistic in our offerings, even as infrastructure remains our bread and butter,” Smith said. “We consider it our mission to bring only the best of the best to our clients.”

As noted above by Sellers, XenTegra will continue to focus on productizing and streamlining AI services to offer to clients in 2025. The team is also committed to ongoing education within their team and in the broader channel community they have built.

“We want to help enrich our customers and the broader community,” Sellers said. “We will see a rapid evolution in tech and services over the next year, but our focus is always on building relationships to keep customers for life.”

Finally, Blue Mantis will continue to pursue the growth trajectory they accelerated in 2024 through acquisition strategies. Fitzgerald said they focus on helping customers achieve quarterly goals and prioritize their projects accordingly.

“Companies, both public and private, are shifting their planning strategies to become more focused and precise, driven by the pressure to deliver quarterly results. This new approach emphasizes clear objectives, necessary resources, and anticipated outcomes,” Fitzgerald said. “Proper prioritization is critical as it creates a balance between what is critical to complete quickly, [considered] low-hanging fruit and longer-term, but higher ROI projects.”

Solutions providers know that planning now will set the stage for development, growth, and opportunity in 2025. Learn more about how MSPs should include or even exclude from their offerings.

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