BitTitan Inc. has added automation and reporting features to its MSPComplete platform that are designed to help channel pros increase the operational efficiency of managed service offerings and measure their profitability more effectively.
The new functionality, which was formally unveiled in Denver during the Kirkland, Wash.-based vendor’s Elevate partner conference, is designed to help MSPs streamline and modernize their business by lowering administrative overhead and making more informed decisions about where and how to allocate resources.
In April, BitTitan armed MSPComplete users to create “runbooks” that document and orchestrate best practice-based managed service workflows. That edition of the product still required a technician to perform each step in those processes, however. The new version lets service providers have MSPComplete execute runbooks on their behalf automatically.
“We believe that this is the next evolution of standard operating procedures,” said BitTitan CEO Geeman Yip in an interview with ChannelPro today.
Automations built in the new MSPComplete release can connect with any external platform that has an API or service bus. The system allows users to create automation scripts manually using a combination of point-and-click tools and the Microsoft PowerShell scripting language, or to import readymade automations from third-party providers via the MSPComplete Publisher Program that BitTitan introduced in July.
That offering, which initially allowed vendors such as Datto Inc. and Dropbox Inc. to distribute manually-executed runbooks to BitTitan customers, now offers pre-scripted automations as well. Managed communication services vendor BVoiP, distributor Arrow Electronics Inc., and on-demand hosted training provider ClipTraining LLC are all slated to add automations to the MSPComplete Publisher Program within the next few days.
So too is Tech Data Corp., of Clearwater, Fla., which will soon allow BitTitan customers to order and provision Microsoft Office 365 licenses directly from within MSPComplete without paying a separate visit to the distributor’s StreamOne cloud marketplace.
MSPComplete’s new benchmarking feature draws on historical data about runbooks and automations to show which workflows are most and least efficient. That’s critical information MSPs need to make intelligent, fact-based decisions about improving, eliminating, and expanding their service offerings.
“Benchmarking my business allows me to learn what’s working and unlearn the things that aren’t,” said Mark Kirstein, BitTitan’s vice president of products, in a morning keynote at Elevate today.
BitTitan views both automation and benchmarking as critical contributors not just to efficiency, though, but to innovation as well. Channel pros who wish to remain competitive in the years ahead, the company argues, must switch from selling products and basic management services to delivering high-margin, industry-specific solutions that address acute business needs and rely on unique intellectual property. Most MSPs are too busy performing rote administrative chores to develop such solutions, however.
“We need to move our thinking upstream, and in order to do that we need to get time back,” Yip said to Elevate attendees during this morning’s general session. Automating management tasks with the help of MSPComplete, he continued, will free up time that channel pros can then apply to more strategic work with greater long-term value.
Furthermore, Kirstein added in an interview with ChannelPro, MSPComplete helps users deliver proprietary solutions in standardized, repeatable, and hence profitable ways.
BitTitan has approximately 55,000 partners in about 150 countries at present. Elevate 2017 is its first partner conference ever. The show, which opened yesterday, concludes on Wednesday.
