Category Archives for "Managed Services News"

In recent months, cloud strategies have taken a noticeable shift. Businesses feel it, and so do reseller partners.

With the global situation—and massive economic impact on businesses of all sizes—the new focus is on one thing: cost optimization. Digital transformation has become a matter of survival, and, with ever-tightening finances, organizations large and small are taking a critical look at their IT environments for opportunities to eliminate cost, drive efficiency and maximize every dollar spent.

This compelling event has become a leading driver to the cloud and is also driving changes within cloud environments.

Cloud adoption is on the rise, and it’s a trend that’s likely to accelerate. In the months ahead, countless businesses will re-evaluate their operations and scrutinize costs, seeking new ways to ensure their current infrastructure is fully optimized.

This presents a golden opportunity for reseller partners, who can step in as expert cloud consultants to uncover new opportunities, make recommendations and help businesses fine-tune existing solutions–whether in the cloud, on-premises or in a hybrid model.

IBM Cloud: Uniquely Positioned to Optimize Costs
As reseller partners approach a slew of new opportunities, it’s helpful to remember how IBM cloud solutions directly address the need for cost optimization. Here are three examples.

1. Companies want: agility balanced with enterprise-grade security.
   Financial institutions are among the many customer segments seeking cost optimization in the “new normal” environment. In addition to data processing speed, efficiency and agility, they want to confidently host apps and workloads in the cloud and be able to demonstrate regulatory compliance significantly faster and more cost-effectively than they are today. An open, hybrid cloud platform enables them to securely build, run and manage applications in a consistent way, across virtually any environment.

Yet financial institutions are also under constant attack by cybercriminals, who find the allure of a successful breach very high–and the potential bounty very lucrative. As such, financial companies need an airtight cyber security strategy to protect themselves from malicious actors.

With the IBM Cloud for Financial Services offering, financial institutions can deploy public cloud to optimize costs, enable innovation and deliver new, more personalized customer experiences, while managing stringent industry regulations for sensitive data and complex workloads.

IBM is the only public cloud platform with the framework in place to support regulatory workloads with automated security and industry-leading encryption services. Only the IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services offering features keep-your-own-key (KYOK) encryption capabilities, backed by the highest level of security certification commercially available—FIPS 140-2 Level 4.

2. Companies want: easy migration of workloads between cloud environments.
   Today’s savvy customer wants choice and to avoid vendor lock-in and a long-term commitment. Since acquiring Red Hat, IBM now has the unique capability to help companies create multi-cloud environments and, with Red Hat OpenShift, to move workloads easily from one cloud to another. Using IBM Public Cloud and Red Hat OpenShift together, partners can now show clients how to move workloads up into the cloud and down to on-premises environments in a more agile way, and leverage cost benefits from multiple clouds instead of relying solely on one.

This agility also helps attract more midmarket and SMB customers—like CPA firms with many workers using large software applications on a seasonal basis (for example, tax season or end of year), and a desire to scale up and down, as needed. With IBM cloud, companies can examine their software portfolio and usage patterns, and decide when to migrate applications from the data center to the cloud for more cost efficiency during slow seasons.

Obtaining a clear picture of software assets is vital. Moving to the cloud provides an excellent opportunity to

Channel partners are busy getting more cloud services into the enterprise. It should come as no surprise that this activity has increased as the coronavirus pandemic has stuck around worldwide.

Channel Futures recently looked at three partners – Accenture, 2^nd Watch and ClearScale – that have bolstered their practices as enterprises move to the cloud at unprecedented rates. This week, we bring you three more (well, two more, really, as 2^nd Watch makes another appearance here) cloud partners making strategic moves. The news comes as organizations continue to require assistance transitioning into the cloud. They also need help managing the resulting resources and keeping access to legacy capabilities intact.

Wipro Expands Its IBM Hybrid Cloud Practice

Global channel partner Wipro has expanded its internal IBM Hybrid Cloud Practice, launched in June. As a result, the technology consultancy will team with technical experts from IBM to help customers with digital transformation. They will use IBM Cloud Paks and Red Hat OpenShift.

The news comes as Wipro has joined forces with IBM Cloud for Telecommunications. That effort aims to give telecom operators open, hybrid cloud architecture for making the most of 5G and edge opportunities.

Within its IBM Hybrid Cloud Practice unit, Wipro will use its management platform that lets enterprises run cloud-native applications from anywhere. Wipro built that interface on IBM technology. Wipro also will rely on its software built with IBM Cloud Pak for Applications. Incidentally, IBM just upgraded some of its Cloud Paks for better data management and improved artificial intelligence.

Bhanuamurthy B.M. is president and COO of Wipro.

Wipro’s Bhanumurthy B.M.

“We believe the future will be driven by hybrid cloud; hence, the expansion of IBM Hybrid cloud practice is intrinsic to our strategy,” said Bhanumurthy. “It will strengthen our relationship with IBM and help accelerate our clients’ transformation journey across hybrid cloud environments.”

IBM, too, is ramping up its hybrid cloud efforts. Big Blue is investing $1 billion in areas including the indirect channel.

Navisite Buys Longtime SAP Systems Integrator

Navisite, an IT channel partner offering managed cloud services to enterprises, has wrapped its purchase of a premier SAP gold partner.

Last week, Navisite said it has acquired Dickinson + Associates, a longtime SAP systems integrator in Chicago. The deal beefs up Navisite’s SAP managed cloud practice, adding business application and platform expertise. It further gives end users more options for migrating to the cloud with legacy software intact.

Mark Clayman, CEO of Navisite, told Channel Futures the Dickinson transaction can be a template for other partners to follow.

Navisite’s Mark Clayman

“The companies we serve in the midmarket need a partner who not only brings the deep expertise, global presence and broad capabilities they need to navigate their most complex IT transformations, but who can also help them quickly pivot to solve more urgent, near-term IT challenges,” he said. “We’ve remained focused on being a partner who is right-sized for their needs. This not only means continuing to acquire and build out highly specialized areas of expertise, but from an organizational standpoint, being flexible in how we operate, and adjust and scale our services.”

Earlier this year, Navisite also snapped up Privo, a premier consulting partner for Amazon Web Services.

Navisite did not disclose the terms of either purchase.

2^nd Watch Addresses Cloud Allocation, Spend Problems with Spot by NetApp

2^nd Watch has teamed with Spot by NetApp to give enterprise IT more power to allocate cloud resources and oversee cloud spend.

The managed cloud services provider has created the 2^nd Watch Spot Instance and Containerization service. The channel partner says cloud sprawl, shadow IT, improper resource allocation and a lack of …

Dell Technologies on Wednesday expanded its PowerProtect portfolio with the PowerProtect DP next-generation integrated data protection appliances. The vendor also expanded its existing PowerProtect family and announced PowerProtect Data Manager enhancements.

The company’s data protection priorities align with statistics gleaned from Dell Technologies Global Data Protection Index Snapshot latest findings. Some key findings: Ninety-four percent of organizations have cloud deployments (public, private, hybrid) for new applications; 71% of companies agree that emerging technologies increase data protection complexity; and 48% of businesses struggle to find data protection solutions for containers. Businesses are challenged to implement a robust data protection strategy.

Dell Technologies’ Caitlin Gordon

“We’ve been helping customers optimize their backup and recovery, but focusing more recently on how we help with reliability,” said Caitlin Gordon, vice president, product marketing at Dell Technologies. “How do we get the workloads protected faster, enable faster recovery and even instant access in some cases? And how do we make that more efficient?”

Recent industry growth comes from integrated appliances that customers favor for their simplicity.

New PowerProtect Series

The new Dell EMC PowerProtect DP series is an integrated data protection appliance. It represents the next generation of the vendor’s data protection products offering backup, recovery, replication, deduplication, cloud readiness with disaster recovery, and long-term retention to the public cloud.

Dell Technologies’ Rob Emsley

“When customers look for data protection appliance solutions, PowerProtect appliances will be our single family of both integrated and target offerings. This will allow customers to have a choice with respect to target with a choice of software — either our own or third-party solutions, or choosing an integrated option, which is becoming more of the norm for customers when they reevaluate what they want to use next,” said Rob Emsley, director of product marketing at Dell Technologies.

The Dell EMC PowerProtect portfolio supports cloud data protection, VMware integration and cyber resiliency. Additionally, the PowerProtect appliances are available not only in integrated and target but also in physical and virtual formats.

The PowerProtect appliances are available on demand in a pay-for-use model using the vendor’s Flex On Demand. Customers can also buy technical expertise as well as fully managed operations.

Cyber Resiliency for All

Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery protects against cyber threats from ransomware to insider attacks. The on-premises turnkey data vaulting solution received a Sheltered Harbor endorsement. The Sheltered Harbor mission, an industry initiative started in 2015, targets the protection of the financial sector’s cyber stability and recovery capabilities.

However, cyber resiliency is a concern across all industries worried about ransomware.

The third piece of Wednesday’s news focuses on the PowerProtect Data Manager. It now protects data in the public cloud in Microsoft Azure and AWS. Additional enhancements include VMware Tanzu support. Data Manager also offers agentless protection of PostgreSQL and Apache Cassandra in Kubernetes environments. Businesses can now protect Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to back up Kubernetes cluster-level resources.

New Partner Opportunity

As the data protection market continues to grow, partners have the opportunity to help customers manage current data protection needs as well as future ones. Dell Technologies PowerProtect allows partners to build recurring revenue streams while helping customers reduce costs, complexity and consolidate data center infrastructure, the company said.

The PowerProtect DP4400 targets the lucrative midrange market, where partners can accelerate adoption while reselling resiliency and data migration services. Margin potential is even greater when partners co-deliver deployment services or resell ProDeploy services.

“Our partners are a critical route to market for us. The DP series of appliances, just like the DD series — there are many customers that have the previous generation of appliances deployed. So there’s an opportunity for tech refresh,” said Emsley.

In particular, customers with appliances that are more than three years old, are a good target market for partners to go after. Additionally, the cyber recovery opportunity is a net new add-on to many customer environments.

The SAP PartnerEdge program is moving into the next phase of its transformation. SAP has released its 2021 Partner Guide, putting into motion key enhancements of last year’s “Next-Generation Partnering” promise.

SAP announced the new partner guide last week on the eve of Tuesday’s SAP Innovation Day for Partners. The enhancements to PartnerEdge include Partner Grouping Agreements (PGAs) that let partners pool resources to expand their geographic coverage maps. SAP has begun offering cross-border certification, removing barriers to those partners tied to selling in one country.

Improvements to the SAP PartnerEdge program will also give partners access to the same tools used by SAP’s internal salesforce. Among them is SAP’s revamped Partner Finder, which uses AI to help patch customers with partners.

SAP’s chief partner officer, Karl Fahrbach, outlined the improvements in a keynote kicking off Tuesday’s virtual event.

SAP’s Karl Fahrbach

“We’re now positioned to orchestrate the full customer journey with you,” Fahrbach said.

With SAP’s new customer success strategy, Fahrbach tacitly acknowledged the company needed remove barriers that restricted many of its partners.

“For many years, SAP tried to do all things to all customers,” Fahrbach said. “And that approach didn’t work. We just cannot serve the needs of every customer. And that’s OK. We have an ecosystem of more than 22,000 amazing partners, each with expertise in different areas.’

Delayed Because of COVID-19

Originally slated to roll out in July, SAP postponed implementing the changes due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the SAP Global Partner Summit in June, the company announced it was moving to a more phased implementation. Like many businesses worldwide, the pandemic has had a significant impact on SAP’s business and that of its partners.

SAP’s Teri Hamann

“We slowed the timeline because we knew a lot of partners would be focused on clawback [and] delivery, depending upon how they were impacted,” Teri Hamann, SAP’s senior VP of partner experience, told Channel Futures. (Read our interview with Teri Hamann here.)

COVID-19 prompted SAP’s decision last month to accelerate its timeline for transitioning customers from existing software to its cloud platform.

In a LinkedIn post, Hamann said the new PGA will help partners deliver improved customer delivery and service.

“The changes will make partnering with us more attractive and create a better experience,” she noted.

SAP has been working on the changes during the past few months after outlining them at June’s partner summit.

“The Partner Grouping Agreement enables SAP and our partners to manage the partner journey in a more holistic way,” she added. “For SAP’s multi-entity partners, we now can bring together all their affiliates into a single corporate group. Partners will then be able to pool resources to meet specific requirements, simplified invoicing, present a unified profile in the SAP Partner Finder and much more. It is a transformational enhancement that will help partners across the globe and the vehicle we will utilize to deliver future program benefits.”

The PGA will let SAP to move to single invoices, Hamann said. It will also let SAP apply …

SAP entered the year with an ambitious agenda for its partners. But the COVID-19 pandemic forced the company to delay implementation of significant enhancements planned for the SAP PartnerEdge program.

During its spring partner conference, the company outlined the enhancements and revised timelines. Teri Hamann, SAP’s partner experience senior VP, previewed the changes at the conference and made them official late last week. Hamann is also a member of this year’s Channel Partners/Channel Futures Top Gun 51, which recognizes premier leaders in the indirect IT and telecom channel. The criteria includes advocacy for the channel and commitment to partners’ business success. There’s also dedication to earning the channel’s trust.

SAP’s Teri Hamann

Chosen by a panel of distributors, master agents and industry analysts for this year’s Top Gun 51 list, Channel Futures spoke with Hamann, focusing on the SAP PartnerEdge enhancements. The following are some highlights, edited for clarity.

Channel Futures: What is the overall goal with the changes coming to the SAP PartnerEdge program?

Teri Hamann: The SAP PartnerEdge program has been in place for 15 years and it has undergone very little change during those years. But it was not reflective of the transition of our business to the cloud. When we started the year, we had real ambitious goals to completely transform the program, and then COVID-19 came.

CF: Presumably, you decided when COVID-19 arrived, it wasn’t the best time to roll out a new program?

TH: Correct. We are trying to be thoughtful and roll things out sequentially over a couple of quarters going into next year. We decided to hold anything that we felt would be disruptive to a partner in terms of them having to do anything to support it, because everyone was struggling with COVID-19. So we slowed our rollout. However, we’ve got some really exciting things coming.

CF: Such as?

TH: We rolled out a significant improvement for our sell partners: cross-border certification. It means our sell partners can now pool their consultants across borders within a region to take advantage of growth opportunities. Prior to this year, the program was recognized at a country level. And there was no going beyond that set border of a country. With the enhanced program, we’re going borderless as much as possible.

CF: What does that mean?

TH: A partner can take advantage and scale and grow much faster, without having to make huge investments in either offices or headcount in the different countries that they want to operate in. This will let them pool their consulting resources, which is a big advantage. It was very well received by the partners. For 2021, we’re going to extend it beyond sell partners and extend it to our services partners. It will allow them to have a lot more flexibility to meet some of our internal minimum requirements by being able to take advantage of that pooling. It applies to any of our partners that have either a reseller agreement with us or are an SAP service partner. Until now they were restricted to the border that they were certified in.

CF: Does this give them global reach?

TH: We have managed the relationship country by country. And now we’re bringing it up to more of a borderless regional level, with the goal of bringing it up to a global level at some point in time.

CF: Will it expand to global next year or is that further out?

TH: Probably 2022 or 2023. It depends on how quickly we can operationalize it.

CF: Why is the shift to cross-border certification important?

TH: As you think about dealing with everything at a country level, if you’re a single entity, or a single country partner, that’s not an issue. But we have a lot of partners that are …

Mobile health care workers report being less than satisfied with devices, data and patient information systems they’re using. That’s according to a recent mobile health care worker study from SOTI. And, many field health care workers report device, data or system failures in the course of doing their jobs.

The new report – Critical Technology for Critical Care: The State of Mobility in Healthcare 2020/2021 – paints a picture of a system not fulfilling its potential for ease of use, improved productivity and better  delivery of health care.

The study, conducted during the pandemic, was designed to find out how effectively frontline health care professionals work with devices, data and patient information systems, and assess their satisfaction.

Not So Effective

SOTI, a provider of mobile and IoT management solutions, commissioned Arlington Research to conduct the study. The agency conducted 475 online interviews with home care workers, visiting nurses and nurses in the field (both private and public). Arlington collected data between Sept. 28 and Oct. 7. The global study queried health care workers in seven countries – the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Sweden and Australia.

SOTI’s Shash Anand

“Mobile technology has never been more business critical in the health care industry than it is today. For years, we at SOTI have been helping equip health care organizations with reliable and efficient digital technology needed to better serve patient needs. This pandemic has only heightened the major gaps in organizations that have not prioritized integrated mobile technology solutions,” said Shash Anand, vice president of product strategy at SOTI. “Implementing mobile technology solutions provides health care workers with a seamless, safer and faster patient experience and equips them with the tools needed to provide critical care.”

The use of devices and patient information systems was widespread among users. Most staff had access to at least one connected mobile device or computer. Despite device access, health care workers report that when initially collecting patient data, between 26% and 39% use paper and pen or manual processes.

Additionally, less than one in four access general medical information through their mobile device. Furthermore, just 18% access patient-specific data, such as test results, through their mobile device.

Other Findings

• Sixty-three percent of respondents experience a mobile device or system failure every week.
• On average, respondents spend five hours a week fixing technical problems.
• Fifty-six percent of frontline workers’ time is spent accessing and updating patient records.
• Eighty-one percent said they sometimes have issues with systems they use to care for patients.
• One-half (50%) don’t have access to tech support or apps to fix their devices.
• Between 32 and 40% report that information for any given patient is not available in a single place.
• Forty-two percent said that data and patient information systems are not well integrated.
• Seventy percent said that the online systems they use do not run on their mobile device.

About one-third of survey respondents said their employees introduced new systems and technologies to help cope with the pandemic. Also, close to one in five said that existing systems had been unable to cope. Another 50% of respondents said that the pandemic significantly impacted the systems and technologies they use at work.

Fifty-four percent of frontline health care workers said using the technology their employers provide wastes time that could be better used helping patients.

Quantum on Tuesday expanded its portfolio for unstructured data. Three new offers expand capabilities for managing and protecting unstructured data across the entire data life cycle.

Included in the announcement are Quantum ATFS, Quantum StorNext 7 File System and Quantum ActiveScale Object Store. The company also is changing its software licensing model, offering it on a capacity basis for all new offerings.

Quantum’s Eric Bassier

“We’re enhancing our highest performance data platform, StorNext. We’re enhancing our most resilient data platform, ActiveScale. And we’re introducing an all-new platform, ATFS, that opens up a new set of opportunities for us and for our partners,” said Eric Bassier, senior director of marketing at Quantum. “We’re also better aligning how we sell our products with the customer value they deliver. I think that’s going to give a better experience for our partners and more opportunity for them as well.”

Deep Dive

Quantum All-Terrain File System (ATFS) is targeted at the general purpose NAS market to give customers new ways to visualize, automate and place data. It’s a next-generation software platform with integrated data classification. The next-generation architecture is designed for any storage media, scale to billions of files, up to 12GBs/performance and to seamlessly extend to the cloud.

The latest version of Quantum’s high-performance file system is Quantum StorNext 7. It provides new ways to optimize NVMe storage for high throughput and low latency workloads. The new version introduces file system pools to improve performance and efficiency. Also, client-side access controls improve security. Customers also get a new and simplified user interface and expanded web services APIs.

The vendor also expanded its object storage portfolio, ActiveScale, with a new entry level model — ActiveScale P100E3. This latest offer protects data against ransomware and improves performance. The smaller capacity model is a three-node object storage system. It has new features such as object lock to protect critical data, which prevents someone from deleting or modifying it for a specified period of time. And, small object aggregation is a new feature that improves system performance.

“We’ve had challenges to compete in the low end of the market because we haven’t had an offer like this. But this will open up low end of the object storage market for us and for our partners,” said Bassier.

Unstructured Data Sprawl

Business customers are dealing with massive unstructured data sprawl, which is growing by 30-60% per year.

“Especially with COVID-19, there’s more data movement happening because workforces are distributed and companies are trying to figure out how they get this data where it needs to be,” said Bassier. “Some of the macro trends are playing into our product strategy. Now we can really start to manage data across its life cycle more than just store it and protect it.”

Ananda Networks, a cloud service startup that emerged from stealth this past summer, has launched its first partner program for MSPs and VARs.

The program will help partners provide customers access to all cloud and on-premises resources for remote, mobile and branch users. This is provided via Ananda Secure Global LAN (SG-LAN).

Some of the benefits of the Ananda Networks partner program are:

• Joint marketing and selling with the the Ananda channel team. This includes joint PR, collateral, webinars and lead-generation programs.
• Technical pre-sales support.
• Ongoing web-based and onsite sales training, including in-depth technical sessions.
• Periodic product and technology road map updates.

Heavy Interest from Channel

Adi Ruppin is co-founder and CEO of Ananda Networks.

Ananda Networks’ Adi Ruppin

“We saw a lot of interest from the channel,” he said. “Especially in these times where organizations are distributed and users are working from home, there’s a great need for solutions to stay connected in a way that’s secure and fast. We provide just that … helping our partners in the cybersecurity and networking spaces deliver a solution that replaces a clunky, slow, less secure VPN, or [by] extending SD-WAN that is deployed in the headquarters and branch all the way to benefit the users working from home.”

Interest is coming from MSPs, as well as with networking-focused VARs specializing in SD-WAN, and security-focused VARs specializing in network security.

Ananda Networks spoke with early partners to build out not only the partner program, but also the product, Ruppin said.

The company used partner input to validate the problem it’s solving and the desired functionality. It also got feedback on what other solutions partners see on the market. Furthermore, it has incorporated their feedback on the desired pricing tiers and sales tools for selling the solution.

Competitive Edge

The new program will give Ananda Networks and its partners a competitive advantage, Ruppin said.

“We hear from our partners that our solution solves a gap in their portfolios … in a timely way,” he said. “It matches well into their portfolios and allows them to deliver better security, better efficiencies, with lower costs to their clients.”

“2020 was a year in which our MSP partners were pressed by their customers to add a remote access option to meet their need for speed, security and capacity due to the new working-from-home trends and the increasingly distributed workforce,” said Aviram Jenik, managing partner of We-Bridge Worlds. “To meet their demands, we are now working with Ananda Networks. [It] offers not only a seamless remote access service, but also one that is a perfect match for the MSP management and pricing requirements. We are proud to add Ananda to our robust MSP solution portfolio.”

Exabeam on Tuesday unveiled its new tagline, “Outsmart the Odds,” part of an upcoming brand transition, during its virtual Spotlight20 conference.

This is the first part of the security information and event management (SIEM) vendor’s rebranding campaign. The brand transition will continue into 2021.

Ralph Pisani is Exabeam’s president. He told attendees that while other companies had to switch to virtual amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Exabeam has been a virtual company from the beginning.

Exabeam’s Ralph Pisani

“This has been a major adjustment for all of you,” he said. “We understand at Exabeam that budgets are going to be tight moving forward. You’re all going to be focused on getting more out of what you already have. Trust me, we will answer that call.”

‘Dramatic Facelift’ Coming

The goal of the brand transition is to “solidify our voice in the market,” Pisani said. Furthermore, the brand transition will make sure customers know that Exabeam is “disrupting an old way of doing things.”

“In cybersecurity, the only way to beat the odds is to outsmart the odds,” he said. “Every day, security teams are up against overwhelming odds, with billions of alerts, insider threats, false positives, expanding attack surfaces. They’re piecing together complex puzzles, trying to understand who did what, and why, and determine the real threats from the fake ones. The odds may be stacked against us. But with Exabeam, we can turn those odds in their favor.”

Over the next five months, Exabeam will undergo a “dramatic facelift” in its branding and messaging, Pisani said.

Nir Polak is Exabeam’s CEO and co-founder. He said the brand transition will benefit partners.

Exabeam’s Nir Polak

“So if you look at our technology partners or our MSSPs, it’s together trying to flip the odds back in the security team’s favor and in the analyst’s favor,” he said. “It’s us and our partners together being fearless against the odds, helping them combat, detect and respond to these modern threats. So it’s us working together with our partners to do the right thing for our customers.”

SaaS Transition

Exabeam has transitioned to a SaaS company, Pisani said.

“When we started the company, our vision was that SIEM should be a SaaS-based product,” he said. “But we realized that many of you had not made that transition. Even before the pandemic, we saw an amazing increase of desire and want to move to SaaS. We saw big cloud-first programs hit. The pandemic accelerated that, but the time has arrived.”

Year to date, 67% of Exabeam’s sales have been SaaS, Pisani said. SaaS allows Exabeam to provide “more, faster and at greater scale.”

“We now find ourselves that we replaced every other SIEM in the Gartner Magic Quadrant,” he said. “Also, we now sit on top of every SIEM in the Magic Quadrant, and provide value in terms of analytics and insider threat. People are still buying those other SIEMs and still have to bring money to Exabeam to get more value out of those SIEMs. Why is this? It’s because they’re focused on automating their investigation.”

The trend toward SaaS is going to continue even post COVID-19, Polak said.

“I think that no one’s going to go back to the normal brick-and-mortar office working scenarios,” he said. “We’re going to continue to see distributed workforces and distributed businesses from now, and I think, forever. It’s changed a lot. It just makes the businesses much more complicated. And for us, it’s the need to connect the dots from all the different silos within the business to allow them to have visibility and protect their data and assets.”

New investments in the Exabeam Partner Program this year include …

Company Name: Integrated IT

Company MSP 501 Rank: 281

Executive Vice President of Sales: Jay Patterson 

Headquartered: Waltham, MA

Primary Services:

• Security and compliance
• Telephony solutions
• Business applications

Twitter: @integratedIT

MSP 501 honoree Integrated IT Solutions has the Northeast covered. How? The IT partner does it with packaged managed services — NetManage, NetAdmin, NetWatch and NetBackup. Integrated IT also offers professional services, consulting and cloud migration services.

But, that’s not all. Sitting still isn’t something in Integrated IT’s DNA. Two years ago, the company built out an MSSP practice. Today, the partner offers an array of security and compliance services. The way the Integrated IT sees it, and many customers have come to realize, is that investing in security and compliance is the cost of doing business today.

What’s not obvious about Integrated IT is that this partner has competed 30 acquisitions since 1999. And just two years ago, a private equity firm bought it.

Integrated IT’s Jay Patterson

Jay Patterson, Integrated IT’s VP of sales, discusses the acquisitions, the company’s growth and conducting business in the age of the pandemic. The MSP also offers some food for thought for its technology partners.

Channel Futures: Is the influx of private equity and increase in M&A activity impacting your business? How?  

Jay Patterson: In a different way than others, in all likelihood. We’ve completed about 30 acquisitions since 1999. We were also acquired by private equity (PE) about two years ago. The biggest impact to us, over the past couple of years, is the fact that there is far more competition out there looking for acquisition targets. PE tends to play in areas of tremendous growth potential and profitability. So that is a good indicator of the industry in general. It seems that every industry out there is trying to get into the monthly recurring revenue model to have more predictable numbers.

One potential downside of PE involvement is the client perception. Some clients worry about the idea of working with a “large firm” or may feel like there will be less of a personal touch with a company owned by private equity. There is also the stigma that profits are paramount and everything else is secondary — which is not only a PE directive. But the fact of the matter is what really makes an MSP profitable is providing white-glove services and being in it for the long haul. We’ve had clients with us for nearly 20 years and we work hard to keep them with us for another 20.

CF: What was the single biggest technology or business decision that drove your company’s growth in 2019? How did it do so?

JP: Compliance and managed security. Companies, for the most part, have come to realize that investing in security and maintaining compliance (where applicable) is just part of the cost of doing business. We’ve seen a surge in project revenue and MRR in the area of compliance and managed security as a result of this.

Two years ago, we went through the process to meet the compliance requirements of some of the most common frameworks found among our client; for example, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, NIST 800-171 and GDPR. We became intimately familiar with the process. We took the technology GAP analysis portion of the initial assessment to form the framework of our managed security offering. Subsequent clients who wanted to follow a similar path to compliance have been able to jump in with both feet (as we did) or start with the items that would show up on their GAP analysis — and engage us for an MSSP agreement. This allows for them to move in the right direction and begin securing the environment. And, when the time comes to complete the compliance program setup, their to-do list stemming from the GAP analysis is …