COMMENTARY: MSP consolidation is no longer just about providers buying providers. Vendors are getting acquired too, and that can change pricing, support, roadmaps, and the tools partners depend on every day. Acquisitions can add real value, but MSPs should know how a vendor grew, how stable its support is, and what happens if ownership changes. The question is not whether consolidation will continue. It is whether your stack can handle it.
Two MSP software acquisitions closed this month.
Barracuda picked up Evo Security. CyberFOX bought Timus. Neither made headlines outside the channel press, and that's the point: this pace is now normal. Drake Star tracked 466 MSP acquisitions in 2025, worth $4.3 billion, up 20% over 2024. Q1 2026 already has 120+ deals logged, private equity is behind the majority of them, and the analysts covering this space aren't calling it a peak. They think this is the new floor.
Most of the conversation about MSP M&A focuses on MSPs buying MSPs, roll-ups, private equity platforms, and consolidation at the services layer. However, what partners actually live with day to day is different: their own software vendors getting bought, merged, and re-platformed underneath them.
So here’s the question every MSP should be asking before signing with a new vendor, or renewing with an old one: how do you know if the vendor you're signing with today is still the vendor you're working with tomorrow?
Buy-first instinct
Look at how a vendor got big, not just how big they are. Kaseya's IT Complete platform was built from acquisitions, Unitrends, RocketCyber, IT Glue, and Datto, among others. ConnectWise has made more than a dozen acquisitions since Thoma Bravo took it private in 2019. That's not a knock; it's a strategy, and it's worked for both companies. But a vendor with that instinct doesn't stop once you're a customer. If the last five product lines came from five different startups, the next one probably will too, and that's the next tool you'll be asked to adopt, migrate to, or replace.
That buy-first pattern also creates pressure on you to expand inside your existing vendor's stack rather than look elsewhere. Consolidating around fewer vendors is often the right call, but MSPs shouldn't adopt the next tool just because it's already sitting in the platform and is easiest to say yes to. It should move the business forward, solve real customer pain, and come with enough contractual flexibility that you're not stuck if the vendor changes shape later.
Support is the floor, not the ceiling
Support quality today is the floor, not the ceiling. If support is already inconsistent before any acquisition talk starts, that's your baseline case, not your worst case. Integrations strain support teams. They get merged, restructured, sometimes offshored. A shaky foundation gets shakier under that kind of pressure, so weigh what you're experiencing right now more heavily than what you're being promised. That's not just ticket close rates. It's how the vendor engages with you, how open they are to feedback, how quickly they move, and the quality of their documentation.
Narrow tools get bought
Narrow tools get bought. Broad platforms do the buying. A single-purpose point solution, one job, one feature set, is a natural acquisition target for a bigger platform trying to fill a gap. A vendor built as one integrated platform across multiple categories (identity, security, backup, endpoint, user management) with multiple revenue streams of its own is far more likely to be doing the acquiring or building its own IP than getting acquired. Figure out where a vendor sits in that picture before you build your stack around them.
Switching isn't free either
None of this makes switching costs disappear. Even when a vendor's roadmap gets stitched together or a support team gets reorganized, walking away still costs you: contract terms, staff retraining, a fresh security review, and client-facing disruption during the transition. Reacting to consolidation risk has a price tag, too.
That said, plenty of acquisitions genuinely add capability, drive down costs, and increase ROI for MSPs who stick with the vendor. The point isn't to run from every vendor with M&A in its history. It's to ask these questions and know who you're actually doing business with, especially for the products you rely on to deliver your services. Don't wait until the acquisition announcement lands in the inbox.
The consolidation wave isn't slowing down. Drake Star's own numbers say the opposite. The safest vendor in this market isn't the biggest by default, and it isn't the smallest either. It's the one that was built instead of bought, kept support intact, and plays in enough categories to be the hunter, not the hunted.
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