Managed Service Provider Week in Review

A number of major revenue-generating partnerships, contracts and acquisition deals were announced in the managed service provider (MSP) space this week. The flurry of activity backs up a recent forecast by Strategy Analytics indicating the global cloud services market generated $34.4 billion in revenue last year, a 28-percent increase over the previous year.

Growth was fueled by Software-as-a-Service, which comprised more than half of all cloud services revenue last year. Public cloud services also captured 83 percent of total cloud services revenue in 2012, with the next big growth surge expected to come from private and public IaaS offerings geared toward European and Asia-Pacific business and government policies.

On the domestic front, Science Application International Corp. (SAIC) scored a $228-million managed services contract to support Sandia National Labs this week. The Department of Energy lab will benefit from SAIC's expertise in engineering and scientific applications during the five-year deal.

SAIC will offer hosting, security and desktop services to the Labs in addition to integration and IT research and development.

Disaster recovery provider Datto announced new tools this week that are designed to expand its partner channel and aid MSPs, IT service providers and value-added reseller (VAR) channel partners. The company is offering training resources, an enhanced partner portal and custom marketing support to its more than 5,000 partners, which comprise the only sales channel for its solutions.

Additional tools include better device tracking and reporting.

And MSP InterCloud Systems, Inc. entered a definitive agreement this week to purchase AW Solutions, Inc. for $5.2 million. AW provides professional services to the telecommunications industry, and will complement InterCloud's portfolio of end-to-end managed and cloud services. The MSP also provides professional services, infrastructure and applications and serves the telecom sector as well as major corporations and governmental entities.