Nine Solution Provider Executives on Growth Opportunities in 2025

Many solution providers expect significant revenue growth next year thanks to opportunities in AI, cybersecurity and hardware upgrades.

Despite many uncertainties, the US is on track for solid growth in 2025, according to a veteran economist who spoke at the 2024 XChange Best of Breed Conference. Executives from major solution providers told CRN that when it comes to IT and security sectors they focus on, growth could be even stronger.

(Related: Quantiphi CEO: The future of AI is ‘superhuman’ productivity)

With huge opportunities to deliver new AI capabilities, modernized approaches to cybersecurity and updated hardware, including PC upgrades due to the end-of-life of Windows 10, solution providers say the growth picture looks very positive by 2025. When it comes to the increased interest in GenAI, for example, “I see the investment coming,” said Jack Skinner, CTO of Oversee My IT, an MSP based in Lewisville, Texas.

During the 2024 XChange Best of Breed conference, hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company, this week in Atlanta, veteran economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin told executives from solution providers in the audience that “in the short term looks pretty good,” even with uncertainties about the US election and global conflicts. “For the foreseeable future, the economy is in very strong shape,” Holtz-Eakin, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, told the audience of C-level executives from major security solutions providers. YOU

CRN spoke with executives from nine leading solution providers during the conference and asked each the same question: “What is your growth projection for your business in 2025 and what will drive it?”

What follows are these nine solution provider executives’ views on growth opportunities in 2025.

Jack Skinner

CTO

Monitor my IT

Lewisville, Texas

I think we will see 10 (percent) to 20 percent growth next year. I think the economy has stabilized a little bit and we’ve seen some positive upswings. And I think that will continue. The end of life of Windows 10 will drive a lot. AI will drive a lot. I think people tried to push their upgrade and technology investment cycles by waiting for them. I think so. We’ve seen the changes in technology and innovation with Qualcomm, with Intel, with AMD. And if they had invested in the last 12 months, they would have been behind the eight ball on this new technology that is coming out. (Customers are likely to) hold on a little bit longer and push that upgrade cycle out, and then I see it in the next 12 to 24 months.

Ray Paganini

regional VP

logically

Dublin, Ohio

This year, business is good. We are getting solid growth, single digit growth. We are looking for higher growth next year. I think it’s just looking at what the AI ​​is doing and seeing if there’s a demand. We do seminars. We teach people. We try to tell them what it could do. We’re seeing a lot of people turn on Copilot. (In security) the big push right now is for artificial intelligence to do so much intelligence on threats: to see if they’re real, if they need to be acted upon, if someone should get their hands on them to put – there is a remedy.

Maryann Pagano

CEO

BlackHawk data

new york

We are looking at 40 percent growth (by 2025). For us, it will definitely be more of a managed services game, more of a professional services game. I think we’re going to do a lot on the OT side, the IoT side. It is a very good space for us. So we will push many services to help secure OT. (We are) still working on private 5G. We have a lot of universities looking at it. It will be recurring income. We will still have hardware sales, especially in the public sector space. But we are trying to generate more recurring revenue.

Brent Yax

CEO

Awecomm Technologies

Troy, Mich.

We are an MSP, focused exclusively on managed services with no hourly or per-project pricing. Almost all monthly recurring income. We’ve historically grown 20 to 25 percent per year. Now we’re at the point where I think we can handle a little faster growth. We hope that by 2025 we can increase it to 30 percent or 35 percent growth. To do this, we are really focused in 2025 on training customers in productivity. We want them to look at the productivity suites, whether it’s Google or Office, and how they use the underlying technology. How do they use their workstations? How do they use their laptops? How do teams do? How do they collaborate? For this kind of thing, the co-pilot and other types of AI are quite important because they can save time. So we’re focused on those things, on training, on enabling. We’ve seen it hit some of the customers we’ve started doing it with and they’re growing a little bit faster than our other customers. So we hope to be able to reflect that across our entire customer base.

(Pictured with Brent is Belinda Yax, Awecomm Partner Advocate)

Adam Kerrigan

M&A partner

Intelligent technical solutions

las vegas

To give some context, we’ve seen a very strong presidential year pattern of very slow growth in our channel. I focus a lot on mergers and acquisitions. I’ve spoken to over 250 MSPs, which is my industry specifically. They have generally gone down with NRR (Net Revenue Retention) spending. Customers keep their wallets very tight. Next year, 2025, I strongly believe that we will see the same pattern that we have seen in historical years, where it starts to emerge. It won’t be as good as 2023, but it will start to rise and be better than 2024.

I think what it is, we’re going to have the presidential election behind us, and then we started to see the Fed cutting interest rates, and so interest will be more affordable. Second, I think people have been putting off projects in 2024 and they will start to feel pressure to start moving forward in 2025.

Jason Wright

CEO

Services managed by Avatar

Houston

We’ve had a pretty incredible growth trajectory in the last couple of years because we’ve put a lot of emphasis on sales and business development. I’m the CEO, but I came up from the sales and marketing side of the business, so we’ve invested heavily in HubSpot for marketing automation. We are doing a lot of “drip sequences” to further nurture our database. Drip sequences are marketing automation campaigns. So if you have a database, you can create these sequences that will drip very specific content to customers over a period of time with specific calls to action.

In the past, it was about building the database and then generating, in terms of sales enablement, what is our unique selling position in the market? What are our differentiators? What is our exit to the market? Strategy, pricing, packaging, we’ve done it all. For 2025, it’s about increasing our investment in marketing automation and reaching new markets, national markets and other geographies. So that’s a big part of our growth plan.

We’re also expanding outside of Texas because we’re moving into the mid-market, the 100-500 user space that The Channel Company’s MES (Midsize Enterprise Summit) really addresses. We have just been to MES in September and exhibited there. So we target the mid-market and sell nationally.

We have a co-managed offering designed to meet businesses wherever they are, as well as an offering focused on cybersecurity. So we’re not really looking to sell anything new. We are selling more than we are already going to market, but at higher volumes to larger companies.

Paul Shaffer

EVP

readjustment

Austin, Texas

In general, we will consider a growth of 15 to 20 percent.

Where we’re investing right now is primarily in the cloud and cyber security. Last year, we made some investments primarily around cyber, in terms of — we acquired sort of a virtual CISO company to help us build that. We started hiring sales resources. We focused on cyber, and we signed up probably over 50 partnerships this year in anticipation of different areas of cyber.

We’re also developing our service areas around those, because primarily our services were tied to a lot of our cloud focus areas around AWS and Azure. Thus, these two areas will continue to be the growth potential of our company.

Manak Ahluwalia

President, CEO

Aqueduct technologies

Canton, Mass.

We certainly think next year will continue to be a growth story for us. There have probably been three major drivers behind this.

No. 1, the type of size and scale of organization that we appeal to is growing and we have been able to move up the market. We are starting to take on many more companies and larger commercial accounts.

No. 2, we continue to see significant demand for our cybersecurity capabilities. Many of our clients face additional governance, risk and compliance issues that our offerings help with. Obviously, security remains a growing concern for many of our customers.

We’re also seeing just the wave of AI driving growth and requiring customers to have infrastructure ready to support their initial use cases, such as leveraging machine learning and generative AI; they all look like great revenue generators for next year.

Backie garter

Founder, CEO

Clutch solutions

Mesa, Ariz.

We are a young company, six years old. Every year, we just double. A lot of this has to do with specific collaborations with what you know is the “popular choice” of the season.

When you go from that startup phase, to $10 million, then $20 million, then $50 million, then $100 million, you have to stop and take a break. So our hyper growth stage has really come to a halt this year with more conscious growth.

We really had to focus internally on our foundation because when you build a company so quickly, you have serious growing pains. So, unfortunately and fortunately, we had to bring Salesforce. We had to change our whole system about how we do business. We had to make sure we could support our customer base because they are at different levels.

By 2025 it is back to normal fast growth. 2024 has been the best growth year because everyone is focused on AI and no one even knows what it really means.