The consolidation wave, counted

Somewhere between 169 and 466 MSP acquisitions closed last year, depending on who is counting. The fact that nobody agrees is the most important thing about this market.

Ask how many MSP acquisitions closed last year and the answer depends entirely on who is counting. Omdia — whose managed services practice now includes the Canalys analyst team — counted 169 publicly announced transactions. Drake Star counted over 320 through just the first three quarters. M&A Signal counted 466 across North America, up twenty percent year over year, and called it the most active roll-up cycle in IT services history.

Those numbers cannot all describe the same market, and yet none of them is wrong. That is the first thing worth understanding about MSP consolidation: it happens in the dark. Most deals are never announced. Almost none disclose price. The counts diverge by a factor of nearly three because each methodology samples a different sliver of a market that is structurally private — and the true number sits above all of them.

Who is doing the buying

Not other MSPs, mostly. Omdia's analysis found private equity in 69% of disclosed deals, and notes that even this likely understates institutional participation, since small MSP-to-MSP deals are the ones least likely to be announced at all.

The scale of the largest platforms is hard to overstate. Evergreen Services Group alone closed dozens of acquisitions last year and celebrated its hundredth cumulative MSP purchase; its Lyra arm reached a billion dollars of annual revenue built almost entirely from businesses that looked, a few years ago, like yours. Behind it sit dozens more platforms — New Charter, Ntiva, Thrive, Sourcepass, and the rest — each with committed capital and a mandate to deploy it.

Omdia's sharper observation is what the deal mix now contains: not just first-time roll-ups but recapitalizations — one sponsor selling a platform to the next. The market is not merely consolidating. It is becoming institutionalized, with assets built to pass through multiple ownership cycles.

What this means if you own an MSP

It means the most consequential financial event of your life will likely begin with an inbound email, priced by a counterparty who has done this dozens of times, evaluated against data you have never seen. The buyers know what MSPs like yours trade for. The trackers that publish ranges — Aventis Advisors puts the median around 8.9x EBITDA across 120 disclosed transactions, with small MSPs discounted more than half against large platforms — are working from the thin public slice. The buyers are working from their own closed deals.

That is an information asymmetry, and in negotiations, asymmetry is price. The owner who first learns what drives their multiple during diligence has already lost the turns that mattered — because the drivers that move a multiple most take eighteen to twenty-four months to show up in numbers a buyer will believe.

The wave is not a reason to panic and it is not a reason to sell. It is a reason to know your number before someone else tells it to you.