The CEOs of Insight, WWT and Cognizant are among the MSP leaders weighing in on opportunities in 2025.
These are some of the biggest technology market opportunities MSPs and solution providers see as 2025 gets underway, as identified in CRN’s annual CEO Outlook project.
CEOs from some of the largest solution providers–including Solution Provider 500 membersInsight Enterprises, World Wide Technology and Cognizant–and MSPs focused on small and midsize organizations weighed in on the biggest opportunities that lay ahead as the world contends with high inflation, geopolitical uncertainty and the future of work in the AI era.
[RELATED: Top Five Largest Tech Markets In 2025: Gartner’s $5.6 Trillion Forecast]
CRN CEO Outlook 2025
IT research firm Gartner expects worldwide spending on IT to reach a record $5.61 trillion in 2025, representing a nearly 10 percent sales increase compared with $5.11 trillion in 2024.
Worldwide spending on IT services should reach $1.73 trillion this year, up from $1.59 trillion in 2024.
This represents a 9 percent spending increase year over year, which is roughly on par with Gartner’s forecast of the entire tech market growing at 10 percent in 2025.
Read on for where MSP executives are putting their time and attention for hyper growth in 2025.
Thai Lee
SHI
CEO, President
Supporting customers as they navigate AI will be a major focus for SHI in 2025, whether it’s helping business and IT leaders identify and refine the AI use cases that can deliver the strongest return on investment, or building the infrastructure to support and deliver AI cost-effectively.
Joyce Mullen
Insight
CEO, President
Every client we speak to today is incredibly excited about AI, but few have found its true business value. 2024 remained a year of trying everything yet adoption at scale is a different story. There’s tremendous opportunity in 2025 to focus on clear business needs and help provide the strategic alignment to deliver smarter processes, cost controls, security measures, governance, etc.
As a solutions integrator, we’re uniquely positioned to bring hardware, software, and services, including deep expertise in data and change management, together to help our clients gain measurable advantages, whether in productivity gains, better customer experiences, or bottom-line cost savings.
Jim Kavanaugh
World Wide Technology
CEO, Co-Founder
Over the last several years, organizations have embraced generative AI (GenAI) to varying degrees. For 2025, the most significant market opportunity we see continues to lie in empowering our customers to unlock the full potential of AI. AI technology can be impactful and transformational, but adoption is complex and demands seamless integration.
The more advanced an organization’s IT infrastructure and digital transformation strategy becomes, the greater the need for a seamless data and cloud strategy, and the greater the need for a proactive and comprehensive approach to cybersecurity.
Our commitment to our customers and the industry extends beyond merely offering AI solutions. We focus on a comprehensive approach made possible through our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), which we have invested over $1 billion in during the past decade and serves as a testbed for innovation and seamless integration with the hardware and software required for AI, digital, cloud, infrastructure and cyber solutions.
Additionally, we recently entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Softchoice, a Canadian software and cloud-focused IT solutions provider, which will enhance our portfolio, strengthen our Microsoft partnership, and increase our access to commercial, small and medium business segments while expanding WWT’s position in the U.S., Canada, and around the world — enabling us to create even greater value for our customers. Supporting our customers on their AI and digital transformation journeys has been a large focus of ours for the past several years and will continue to be a priority in 2025.
Mark Marron
ePlus
CEO, President
Our top priority is always to make sure that the services and solutions we offer are aligned with what our customers need to succeed. As such, the Services market continues to be a big opportunity for us as organizations continue to navigate not only rapid technology advancements, but budget, staffing and internal skills constraints.
There are a number of benefits to be realized when organizations use one, singular provider to strategize, implement and in some cases manage technology projects and investments, including more efficient use of existing technology and a stronger, faster return on technology investments.
They view us as an extension of their team, freeing up their own internal resources to focus on strategic projects critical to their core business. In addition, AI has made its way into almost every technology conversation and will continue to do so in 2025.
We conducted a recent survey that showed most respondents consider themselves to be at the cusp of their AI journey, whether AI curious (42 percent or AI ready (28 percent). That said, a maturation gap in terms of implementation remains, with only 24 percent considering themselves to be AI Mature. Almost every organization is trying to determine how, when and for what purpose to leverage AI, and ePlus can help them figure out all of these things.
Our full portfolio of AI Ignite offerings, from workshops and assessments and use case development to the launch of our AI Experience Center and our latest Secure GenAI Accelerator service have all been designed with the wide spectrum of challenges our customers are facing in mind.
Helping our customers find the right, balanced and prudent technology approach to make their AI initiatives successful will be a big focus for us this coming year. This includes every area that touches AI, like networking, data storage, cloud requirements and of course security.
Maryann Pagano
BlackHawk Data
CEO, Co-Founder
Our biggest opportunity in 2025 lies in Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) for the underserved markets of multi-unit buildings, senior living facilities, and municipalities.
As connectivity needs and cybersecurity risks continue to rise, organizations in these spaces require reliable, scalable, and cost-effective solutions.
We will offer a fully managed, turnkey NaaS solution that integrates redundant internet connections via SD-WAN, cybersecurity, automated threat detection/response, and wireless and wired connectivity.
This solution will be delivered through an OPEX model, enabling customers to modernize their networks without the heavy CAPEX burden. Additionally, the rise of IoT and OT applications in these sectors amplifies the demand for such services, positioning us at the forefront of this transformation.
Ravi Kumar S.
Cognizant
CEO
The biggest market opportunity is leading the AI revolution by delivering industry-nuanced technological expertise and innovations to our clients.
The AI wave has the potential to unlock hyperproductivity and address the tremendous amount of tech debt and backlog.
Organizations must establish a robust foundational infrastructure to support a tech-enabled future, but the data and AI foundations are currently nascent across enterprises. Beyond 2025, enterprise scale will transition focus to agentification and multi-agent orchestration, introducing evolved AI-forward business models.
Cognizant is at the forefront of the AI wave, enhancing our platforms, services, engineering, research and development (ER&D), to deliver the last mile infrastructure and tooling to support our clients in their journeys.
Martin Schroeter
Kyndryl
CEO, Chairman
As you would expect from a services company, our biggest opportunities are aligned to our customers’ priorities.
And our recently published Kyndryl Readiness Report, which explored how businesses’ IT and talent helps or hinders their progress and how ready businesses are for future risks and opportunities, found that 90 percent of business and IT leaders are confident that their IT infrastructure is best-in-class, yet only 39 percent of business leaders say their IT is ready to manage future risks.
That’s a notable gap, and in 2025 we’ll help our customers address it with modernization programs that utilize cloud, security and AI technologies.
Bob Cagnazzi
Presidio
CEO
As organizations continue to shift mission-critical workloads to and from the cloud, the demand for more secure, scalable, and automated infrastructure solutions will surge–in particular, accelerated compute.
At Presidio we see a tremendous opportunity in integrating these platforms with advanced programmability–embracing AI, data analytics, and software-defined networking–to deliver business outcomes faster and at greater scale.
Luis Armendaris
Gordon Lewis Group
CEO, Founder
In 2025, we see a significant market opportunity in leveraging our international partnerships to strengthen the IT channel through cross-border collaboration, particularly between the United States and the Latin American region.
We believe there is immense potential for service providers and vendors to exchange services, expertise, and markets, fostering healthier competition and creating value for all stakeholders.
By globalizing the channel, we open doors to cost-effective workforce solutions from Latin America that can address critical needs for U.S. companies, while introducing U.S. tools and solutions to new markets in Latin America, where they are primed for adoption at the enterprise level.
For example, when solutions become cost-effective for the SMB market in the U.S., they often align perfectly with the needs of the enterprise market in Latin America. This dynamic creates mutual opportunities for managed service providers (MSPs) in both regions to co-manage, consult, and partner effectively.
We are particularly focused on enabling partnerships that bridge these gaps, ensuring MSPs, vendors, VARs, and distributors can collectively deliver better outcomes for their clients and communities.
This global collaboration not only strengthens individual businesses but also contributes to a more robust and healthy IT channel ecosystem worldwide. We encourage MSPs to embrace these opportunities and explore how going global can elevate their business and the industry as a whole.
Caylent
CEO
Our biggest market opportunity in 2025 is in helping companies reduce their legacy technical debt and update their existing infrastructure to unlock the full potential of AI and generative AI.
By modernizing infrastructure and applications, we aim to empower organizations to integrate these transformative technologies into their operations, enabling faster innovation and measurable business outcomes.
What sets us apart is our proven ability to turn customer ideas into impact faster than leading industry competitors. We accomplish this by delivering across all parts of the IT stack – from infrastructure to application development to data. Validated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) with three prestigious Partner of the Year Awards, we bring deep expertise in applied AI, data engineering and cloud-native application development.
Our hands-on experience through hundreds of projects and unique understanding of AWS enables us to deliver differentiated solutions that not only address immediate challenges, but also, create scalable, long-term value for our customers.
