New research suggests the MSPs who show up are the ones who take security most seriously, and who actually build partnerships, not just talk about them.
Ask any MSP owner what they need more of, and “partners” lands somewhere between “sleep” and “a technician who actually documents things.” Today’s managed services business is just too broad to run alone. Clients want security, Cloud, compliance, AI readiness, and a help desk that picks up on the first ring.
No single shop covers all of that well. So the smart ones build alliances: with other MSPs, with vendors, with distributors who know where the margin hides. The hard part isn’t wanting partners, it’s finding them.
Partnership doesn’t happen in a ticket queue
Day to day, an MSP’s calendar belongs to its clients. Patch cycles, onboarding, the afternoon outage that eats up the evening. Meeting a potential partner means a cold message, a discovery call booked three weeks out, a demo that runs long, and a follow-up that quietly slides.
Trust, the real currency of partnership, is slow to build over video. That’s the gap MSP GLOBAL exists to close. For a few days, the whole channel shares one space: MSPs and MSSPs of every size, the vendors whose tools they run, the distributors in between, and peers facing the same pressures. Conversations that would take a quarter to schedule happen over coffee.
That has long been the hunch. Now there’s data behind it.
Better informed: security sits at the top of the list
Open Eye Research cross-referenced respondents to the January, April, and July 2026 waves of the State of the MSP Industry pulse surveys against MSP GLOBAL’s attendee records. The comparison: MSPs who attended in 2025 versus those who didn’t.
The clearest result is about cybersecurity. In every wave, 2025 attendees ranked it among their top three business priorities more often than non-attendees: 33% versus 29% in January, 38% versus 34% in April, and 44% versus 20% in July. The gap widened each time.
For security vendors, the message is simple: the crowd at MSP GLOBAL leans toward the part of the market most focused on what they sell. Read it from the MSP side, too: the providers who show up are the ones most alert to the threat landscape, comparing notes on what attackers are doing now and which defenses actually hold. A better-informed community makes for better conversations on the show floor.
Better networked: attendees partner more in practice
The second finding goes straight to the partnership question. In all three waves, 2025 attendees reported higher rates of active partnering, meaning they regularly or occasionally co-deliver projects with another MSP or a vendor. In July, the split was 75% for attendees versus 53% for non-attendees.
Three out of four. These MSPs don’t just talk about the ecosystem; they work inside it. They split projects, fill capability gaps, and put their name next to someone else’s on a client deliverable.
The pattern also says something about how they operate. These are doers who respond to real introductions and real opportunities, not to slide decks about why partnering matters. Which is exactly what a room full of potential partners provides.
The whole ecosystem, in one place
A third signal rounds out the picture. Asked whether they’d buy most or all products directly from vendors if pricing were equal, attendees were meaningfully less likely to say yes: 32% versus 43% in April, and 44% versus 60% in July. MSP GLOBAL’s audience values the channel, and the distributors and partners who make it work.
Put those three findings together and you get a clear profile: security-minded, partnership-active, channel-loyal. That is the ecosystem MSP GLOBAL brings together, on the expo floor, in the sessions, and in the hallways between them.
A quick caveat: this is correlation, not causation. Attendees in the dataset skew toward core MSP and MSSP businesses and mid-size firms, and the sample sizes are modest. Companies that come to conferences may already lean toward partnering. But that’s the point. The MSPs who build their businesses on partnership choose to make the journey, and so this is where partners find each other.
Where partnership becomes a reality
Partnership is easy to endorse but hard to schedule. MSP GLOBAL compresses months of outreach into a few days, surrounded by peers who are better informed on security and better networked by habit.
If your business grows through the people you work with, this is where you meet them. See you at MSP GLOBAL!
