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AWS Managed Services Market Forecast: The MSP Cloud Opportunity

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) managed services market is expected to hit $1.8 billion by 2026, clipping along at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 14 percent, a recent research report predicted.

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According to Transparency Market Research’s AWS Managed Services Market – Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast, 2018–2026 report, AWS managed service providers (MSPs) will pay a significant role in the segment’s growth as the number of AWS customers increases.

Cloud adoption by some 2,000 U.S. government agencies is also driving the sector’s growth, the researcher said, pointing as an example to the Department of Defense’s $1 billion cloud deal last February with Rean Cloud, a Herndon, Virginia-based AWS MSP. Industry consolidation is also modifying the market, with companies striking new partnerships along with strategic merger and acquisition deals, such as Rackspace’s purchase late last year of Datapipe, to expand their AWS managed services offerings worldwide, Transparency said.

For purposes of measuring the AWS managed services market, Transparency segmented it into three service types: advisory, cloud migration and operations. The advisory services segment is likely to expand at a significant CAGR of more than 15 percent during the forecast period, the analyst said, prodded by a need among AWS customers for consulting services to secure optimal functioning and identify workloads for cloud migration. The operations services segment is still estimated to hold a prominent share of the market, however, with an emphasis on operational activities such as ongoing infrastructure operations, access management, security management, change management and incident management, according to Transparency.

Regional Trends, and MSP Giants

As for geographic concentration, North America is expected to hold a substantial share of the global AWS managed services market during the forecast period due to the adoption of AWS in a number of industry verticals in the region.

Market heavyweights Accenture, DXC Technology, Rackspace, Capgemini and Slalom, among others, are profiled in the Transparency report.

Other researchers place AWS at the top of the market for public cloud services. For example, Synergy Research in a new report said AWS is the “clear leader in all four of the world’s major regions,” outdistancing both Microsoft and Google as ranked by public Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Within the public cloud, AWS alone accounts for almost 40 percent of the market and the three vendors in aggregate account for well over 60 percent, Synergy said.

And, a Gartner ratings analysis of use case capabilities gave AWS a 3.99 out of 5 for application development, 3.08/5 for analytics, 3.61/5 for IoT, 3.77/5 for cloud native applications and 3.61/5 for general business, leading Microsoft in all measurements.

As a point of comparison, the entire managed services market worldwide is expected to reach about $230 billion by 2020, according to researcher Statista. By 2026, the AWS managed services portion of that, irrespective of its projected strong growth curve, is likely to remain less than one percent of the total sector.