With each quarterly edition, MSP GLOBAL’s State of the Industry Report gains authority to interrogate the shifts in sentiment and strategy among MSP professionals globally – and differentiate true trends from the noise.
In this its fifth wave, the series comes into its own as an increasingly nuanced industry barometer.
While Spring’s report revealed a complex market across major themes including cybersecurity, collaboration, acquisitions and AI, the Summer 2026 edition goes further, unafraid to reframe previous conclusions.
It uncovers a picture of an industry whose priorities are in flux, whose members are making tactical moves with confidence, and where quarterly monitoring is essential to keep up with its shifts.
Moment or momentum?
Summer’s data puts the brakes on currents that Spring identified as structural changes.
After three consecutive quarters of climbing in importance, cybersecurity has dropped by 5.6 percentage points, falling out of respondents’ top three business priorities.
Compliance-as-a-Service, which had been a “a multi-wave growth story”, also dropped back in Wave 5.
And what Spring called the most stable metric in the series, innovation posture, shifted significantly.
This tells us that we are looking at a dynamic industry, whose analysis benefits from a growing data set.
One true trend
One assertion that holds is AI’s move from strategy to infrastructure.
This quarter, internal AI use jumped more than any other AI metric, while client-facing applications also grew alongside internal for the first time since 2025.
Confidence, too, continues to rise. Industry and business confidence both reached new highs in Summer 2026, signalling that the unsettling of other metrics reflect tactical recalibration by MSPs, rather than eroding conviction.
An attitude emerges
Overall active partnering activity remains flat-to-slightly-down, even as attitudes to collaboration remained strong this quarter, indicating an industry belief-behavior gap.
A similar story is emerging regarding distribution channels. While the stated preference for direct-to-vendor continues to grow, reaching 85%, we are yet to see actual behavior shifting.
At present, sentiment tends to outpace action. The open question is whether the gap will close.
Eyes on the industry
Five waves in, if we’ve learned anything, it’s that this market merits re-testing each quarter.
The Summer data shows that what once appeared to be a multi-quarter shift can just as quickly reverse.
It will be for Wave 6 to bear out this lesson, to track the belief-behavior gap and to keep tabs on the AI trajectory.
Download the State of the MSP Industry Report here.
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