While putting in bids for between 200 and 300 contracts last year, Britt said Synoptek only come across a direct competitor on three occasions. 

"It's hard to find a pure managed services business that's greater than $25 million," he said.

Even the largest managed services players such as mindSHIFT – which was sold by Best Buy to Ricoh in January 2014 – aren't doing more than $150 million in sales each year.

And Britt said large solution providers like Presidio, No. 23 on the CRN Solution Provider 500, that do managed services tend to derive a relatively small percentage of their revenue from it.

There are two strategies currently in play in the managed services industry, Britt says. Britt said MSPs working with large enterprise customers are acquiring the skills and talent needed to become top providers of a specialized service or cloud capability.

But in the SMB space – where Synoptek operates – Britt said it's about acquiring market share and a broad range of services so that customers can deal with one or at most two partners.

"It's a ripe market for aggregation and acquisition," he said.        

With the Rocket Science acquisition, Synoptek's largest market is now the Bay Area. Its home base of Orange County, Calif., comes in second. The company is the largest MSP in Orange County, Britt said.

Synoptek began pursuing acquisitions in 2007, Britt said, but had to shelve its expansion plans the following year when the financial meltdown made obtaining capital an extremely expensive proposition.

The MSP regrouped and started again pursuing M&A deals in 2011 as acquiring capital became less expansive.