BitTitan Inc. has equipped its MSPComplete automation and orchestration solution for managed service providers with a new “task library” of pre-written procedures for deploying and maintaining Microsoft Azure environments.
Designed to be ready for use in minutes with no coding experience necessary, the new processes can be combined to form fully-automated wizards for completing common but often complex Azure-related activities like setting up user accounts and standing up virtual machines.
BitTitan, which is headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., announced the new functionality at Microsoft’s 2018 Inspire partner conference, which is taking place this week in Las Vegas.
“There’s like 20 steps you have to go and do to create a virtual machine,” observed BitTitan CEO Geeman Yip today in an interview with ChannelPro outside the Inspire convention hall. Wizards based on items in the new task library cut that down to one step.
“All they have to do is press a button,” Yip says. The benefits, he continues, include faster resolution times on support tickets, lower service delivery costs, and higher profitability.
The new library is available immediately at no extra cost to existing and new MSPComplete customers. At present, it contains more than 40 tasks, with more to come. They join an extensive set of previously introduced automations for Office 365 and other managed service-related activities.
Task automations like those introduced today are the latest evolution of MSPComplete, which first reached market in the fall of 2015. Last April, BitTitan released a significantly enhanced edition of the product that let MSPs create “runbooks” defining proven, efficiency-enhancing standard operating procedures for administrative tasks. The system guided users through those processes step by step, but technicians did the actual work themselves by hand.
In October, the company introduced automation functionality that let MSPComplete perform management procedures on a channel pro’s behalf. Tasks like those announced today for Azure take that functionality one step further by enabling users to create automations without manual coding. “We’re actually giving you more granular automation building blocks that you can design into standard operating procedures,” Yip says.
Azure is an especially good use case for pre-written tasks, Yip continues, because many MSPs that want to build service practices around it currently lack the technical know-how to do so. Cloud distributor Pax8 Inc., of Greenwood Village, Colo., introduced a professional services program offering help with Azure rollouts this week for the same reason.
At present, Azure is the only public cloud platform for which BitTitan has defined pre-assembled tasks. According to Yip, the company will add automations for platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform if user demand warrants it. In the meantime, he continues, MSPComplete users can create automations for those and other infrastructure- and software-as-a-service environments themselves.
