Many solution providers are expecting major revenue growth next year thanks to opportunities in AI, cybersecurity and hardware refreshes.

Despite many uncertainties, the U.S. 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 top solution providers told CRN that when it comes to the IT and security sectors that they focus on, the growth could be even stronger.

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With massive opportunities ahead in delivering new AI capabilities, modernized approaches to cybersecurity and updated hardware—including PC refreshes due to Windows 10 end-of-life—solution providers say that the growth picture looks very positive for 2025. When it comes to the surging interest in GenAI, for instance, “I do 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 solution provider executives in the audience that “the near term looks quite good” even with uncertainties over U.S. elections and global conflicts. “For the foreseeable future, the economy is in very solid shape,” Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, told the audience of C-level executives from leading IT solution providers.

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

What follows is the insight from these nine solution provider executives on growth opportunities in 2025.

Jack Skinner

CTO

Oversee My IT

Lewisville, Texas

I think we’ll see 10 [percent] to 20 percent growth in the next year. I think that the economy has stabilized a little bit, and we’ve seen some positive upticks there. And I think that that will continue. Windows 10 end-of-life is going to drive a lot. AI is going to drive a lot. I think that people tried to push their refresh and their technology investment cycles out waiting for those. I think rightfully so. We’ve seen the changes in technology and innovation with Qualcomm, with Intel, with AMD. And had they invested in the last 12 months, they would have been behind the eight ball on that new technology that’s coming out. [Customers will likely] hold on a little longer and push that refresh cycle out, and then I see that in the next 12 to 24 months.

Ray Paganini

Regional VP

Logically

Dublin, Ohio

This year, the business is good. We’re getting some solid growth, single-digit growth. We’re shooting for higher growth next year. I think it’s just watching what AI is doing and seeing if there’s a demand for it. We hold seminars. We instruct people. We try to tell them what it could do. We’re seeing a lot of people turn on Copilot. [On security] the big push right now is to have AI do as much intelligence on the threats—to see if they’re real, do they need to be acted on, does somebody need to put their hands on it to remedy it.

Maryann Pagano

CEO

BlackHawk Data

New York

We’re looking for 40 percent growth [in 2025]. For us it will be definitely more the managed services play, more professional services play. I think we’re going to do a lot on the OT side, the IoT side. It’s a really good space for us. So we’re going to drive a lot of services in helping secure OT. [We’re] still working on private 5G. We’ve got a lot of the universities looking at it. That’ll be recurring revenue. We’re still going to have hardware sales, especially in the public sector space. But we’re trying to drive more toward recurring revenue.

Brent Yax

CEO

Awecomm Technologies

Troy, Mich.

We are an MSP, focused exclusively on managed services with no per-hour or per-project pricing. Almost all monthly recurring revenue. We have historically grown 20 percent to 25 percent per year. Now we’re at the point where I think we can support a little bit faster growth. We’re hoping in 2025 we can bump that up to 30 percent or 35 percent growth. To do that, we’re really focused in 2025 on training customers in productivity. We want them to look at productivity suites, either Google or Office and how they use basic technology. How do they use their workstations? How do they use their laptops? How do they do Teams? How do they collaborate? For those type of things, copilot and other types of AI are pretty important because it can be a time-saver. So we are focused on those things, on training, enablement. We’ve seen it impact some of the clients that we’ve started to do this with, and they grow a little bit faster than our other clients. So we’re hoping we can mirror that through our entire client base.

(Pictured with Brent is Belinda Yax, Awecomm partner advocate)

Adam Kerrigan

Partner for M&A

Intelligent Technical Solutions

Las Vegas

To give that some context, we’ve seen a very strong pattern of the presidential year being very slow growth in our channel. I focus a lot on M&A. I’ve talked to over 250 MSPs, which is my industry specifically. Across the board, they’re down with NRR [net revenue retention] spending. Clients are keeping their wallets very tight. Next year, in 2025 I believe strongly we’re going to see the same pattern we’ve seen in historical years, where it starts to come up. It won’t be as good as 2023, but it will start to come up and will be better than 2024.

I think what it is, we’ll have the presidential election behind us, and then, we started to see the Fed cutting the interest rate, and so interest is going to become more affordable. Second, I think people have been putting off projects in 2024, and they’re going to start feeling pressure to start proceeding in 2025.

Jason Wright

CEO

Avatar Managed Services

Houston

We’ve been on a pretty incredible growth trajectory the last two years because we placed a heavy emphasis on sales and business development. I’m the CEO, but I came up through the sales and marketing side of the business, so we’ve invested heavily in HubSpot for marketing automation. We’re 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 build these sequences that will drip very specific content to the customers over a period of time with specific calls to actions.

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 marketplace? What are our differentiators? What is our go to market? Strategy, pricing, packaging, we’ve done all that. For 2025, it’s about escalating our investment in marketing automation and reaching out to new markets, national markets, other geographies. So that’s a big part of our growth plan.

We’re also expanding out of Texas because we’re moving up into the middle market, the 100- to 500-user space that The Channel Company’s MES [Midsize Enterprise Summit] really addresses. We just were at MES in September and exhibited there. So we’re targeting the middle market and selling nationally.

We have a co-managed offer designed to meet companies where they’re at, and a cybersecurity-focused offer as well. So we’re not really looking to sell anything new. We’re selling more of what we already go to market with, but at higher volumes in the bigger companies.

Paul Shaffer

EVP

Redapt

Austin, Texas

In general, we’re going to target 15 percent to 20 percent growth.

Where we’re investing right now is primarily around cloud and cybersecurity. This past year, we put some investments primarily around cyber, in terms of—we acquired a kind of virtual CISO company to help build that out. We started hiring sales resources. We focused on cyber, and we probably signed up 50-plus partnerships this year in anticipation of different areas of cyber.

We’re also building out our services areas around those as well,because primarily our services were tied to a lot of our cloud focus areas around AWS and Azure. So those two areas will continue to be the growth potential for our company.

Manak Ahluwalia

President, CEO

Aqueduct Technologies

Canton, Mass.

We definitely think next year is going to continue to be a growth story for us. There have been probably three major drivers behind that.

No. 1, the type of size and scale of organization that we appeal to is growing and we’ve been able to move upmarket. We’re starting to take on a lot more enterprise and larger commercial accounts.

No. 2, we’re continuing to see some significant demand for our cybersecurity capabilities. A lot of our customers are dealing with additional governance and risk and compliance issues that our offers lend really well to. Obviously, security continues to be a growing concern for a lot of our customers.

We also are seeing just the wave of AI fueling growth and requiring customers to get infrastructure ready to support their initial use cases, how they’re leveraging machine learning and generative AI—those all to us seem to be strong revenue drivers for next year.

Garrette Backie

Founder, CEO

Clutch Solutions

Mesa, Ariz.

We’re a young company, six years old. Every year, we just double. A lot of that has to do with specific partnerships with what you know is the ‘hot pick’ for the season.

When you go from that startup-bootstrap stage, then up to $10 million, then $20 million, then $50 million, then $100 million—you’ve got to stop and pause. So our hypergrowth stage has really stopped this year to more of a mindful growth.

We really had to focus internally on our foundation because when you build a company that fast, you have severe growing pains. So unfortunately and fortunately, we had to bring in Salesforce. We had to change our whole system on how we do business. We had to make sure that we could support our customer base because they’re on different levels.

2025 is back to normal of growing fast. 2024 has been the best year for growth because everybody’s just focusing on AI and no one even knows what it really means.