by Richard Tubb

Conference Season is (phew!) over: This past quarter offered so many popular IT Conferences that it would have been quite easy to spend all your time visiting one conference after another. With the GFI Max Worldwide Conferences, Autotask Community Live!, VMWorld, the CompTIA EMEA Conference, CRN Channel Conference and IP Expo plus many others - it becomes hard to keep track of all the news that is important to your MSP business. Here are the 3 top stories I think you won't want to miss out on.

According to Markets And Markets managed services are to grow further in the near future-- the market is set to reach $256.05 billion in 2018 (up from $142.75bn in 2013) with a CAGR of 12.4% for the 2013-2018 period. 

The analyst expects N. America to remain the biggest market, but EMEA and MEA should also increase market traction during the forecast period. 

Industry trends show high managed services demand across all industry verticals. Markets and Markets says managed services implementations reduce enterprise IT costs by 30-40%, while increasing outsourced process operational efficiency by almost 50-60%.  Read more...

Lexmark spends $31.5 million in order to continue its shift towards solution-centric business-- it acquires cloud-based media management platform developer Twistage and signage solution developer AccessVia. 

Twistage offers a cloud-based software video, audio and image content management platform allowing customers to deliver rich media content within firewalls and outside network boundaries on virtually any format. 

Meanwhile the AccessVia platform allows customers to create and print on-demand retail shelf-edge materials one can direct to a variety Read more...

Nexthink releases the next version of its managed service provider software-- Nexthink V4.3, now promising not only quality improvements but also multi-tenant support and full-centralised role and profile management. 

According to the company Nexthink uses self-learning to map all IT services delivered to end-user (physical and virtual) devices, before analysing all relevant end-user events (such as IT infrastructure changes, application use and security issues). It then applies artificial intelligence and real-time enterprise-wide IT analytics Read more...