How Private Equity is Reshaping the MSP Market
When Your IT Company Gets Bought Out, Your Security & Service Often Get Sold Out
In the last five years, private equity has poured billions into the IT services industry. If you run a business, there’s a good chance your Managed Services Provider (MSP) has already been acquired or is being courted. On the surface, these rollups get marketed as a win: consolidated vendors, bigger networks, access to new tools, but behind the scenes, something else is happening.
Costs are going up. Service levels are going down. Clients are losing control.
I've been in this industry for over 25 years. I run my own firm. I’ve worked in corporate IT. I’ve watched more than a few of our peers get swallowed up by national platforms. What clients are left with isn’t better service. It’s layers of red tape, rotating helpdesk techs, and policies that prioritize margin over people.
Let’s break this down.
The Standardization Trap
Private equity-backed MSPs love standardization. It makes sense from a business perspective: align every client to one stack, automate support, and sell the same service repeatedly. But in the end, especially for small to midsize businesses, it can mean giving up flexibility and choice.
Got a unique compliance need? A legacy system? A preferred way to back up your data? Tough. If it’s not in the standard offering, it’s not supported. That’s efficient for the MSP, but it often works against your actual business needs.
Not to mention that standard offerings create honey pots for cybercriminals. You now have a bigger cache of data with a single point of failure.
Who Are You Really Talking To When You Call Support?
We’ve heard this story too many times: The monitoring and maintenance seem fine at first. You don’t really notice the change in service until there’s a real issue. Now the phone rings to a call center. The people who onboarded you are gone. The support team has no context for your setup, your industry, or your risk profile.
Local accountability disappears. Service becomes a script. Wait times balloon, and it can take days to get someone out to your place. And now, your business is stuck in a long-term contract with no clear path forward.
What Local MSPs Are Doing Differently
At Solve iT, we’ve decided not to pursue outside funding. That means no investors pushing us to scale at the expense of service. No pressure to cut corners. No incentive to move your data offshore or replace our team with AI.
Local MSPs focus on one thing: delivering the same high standard of service to every client, every day. Whether you’re a five-person dental office or a 300-person healthcare nonprofit, you get the same tools, same response time, and same commitment.
We do this with a 24/7 helpdesk staffed by real people. Our response times average under 3 minutes. We audit our own tools and produce reports that are non-technical and client-ready. We back our work with a $1 million breach protection warranty. We treat your IT like it’s our own.
Your IT Partner Should Still Feel Like a Partner
If your MSP has changed hands recently, it’s worth asking:
- Has the pricing changed?
- Has the service quality changed?
- Are you still getting the access and expertise you were promised?
If the answer is no, you don’t have to stay stuck.
Solve iT offers a no-cost, no-commitment threat assessment that includes a dark web scan, phishing test, and cyber insurance readiness check. We’ll tell you exactly where you stand and how to fix it, whether you hire us or not.
At the end of the day, it’s your business. You should be able to trust the people protecting it.