Here are three other insights from the SIM survey:

Top IT Management Issues

After security, IT leaders place high priorities on innovation and organizational agility and flexibility, as well as reducing costs in IT and across the other business units. In fact, those issues moved up the list of "top 10" concerns from last year.

Top IT Worries

For the third straight year, security is the top worry among IT leaders, followed by having sufficient skills and retaining people (third in 2015 but second in 2014). This reinforced the potential role security services providers can offer, as well as solution providers that offer temporary help.

Largest IT Investments

For the eighth straight year of the SIM survey, analytics and business intelligence emerged as the top IT investment, selected by nearly 40 percent of IT leaders.

Right behind it – at 34 percent – was application/software development and maintenance, up from No. 4 in the 2015 survey. SIM called that movement "interesting," given the "rise of software packages and cloud-based offerings that often claim to reduce development activities."

More Cloud

The march toward the cloud will become louder this year. About 15 percent of IT budgets will be allocated toward cloud services, such as SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, the survey found. That's up from 12 percent last year and 7.7 percent in 2015.

"Cloud is going to keep growing because, like all outsourcing was at one time … it’s a financing deal and CFOs love it," Kappelman said. "It's agility; it's scalability … if you can pull capital investment and turn it into expense, you're in heaven if you're the CFO."

Message To MSPs: Focus On The Pain Points

Kappelman believes technical and operational parts of IT "will continue to be outsourced because internal IT needs to focus on … innovation and strategy."

So, when it comes to vying for some of that business, service providers need to focus on one thing when they talk with IT leaders.

"It's about taking their pain away, solving their problems," Kappelman said. In the end, he added, the purchasing decision comes down to answering these two questions: "Can they take away the pain? Can they help me sleep better at night?"