ScalePad has added two new capabilities to its portfolio of automated asset management services for MSPs.
The first helps users of the vendor’s core software and hardware asset management tools calculate a “digital maturity” score for their customers that objectively assesses how secure, reliable, and properly configured their environment is in comparison to SMBs in aggregate.
The second is a consolidated cross-platform backup monitoring tool from Backup Radar, a third-party vendor that ScalePad has acquired for an undisclosed sum.
The digital maturity score, which works much like a credit score, is designed to give MSPs a concrete basis for showing customers how they measure up against peers.
The system ranks businesses on a “digital maturity index” running from 300 to 850 based on how many servers they have out of warranty, how many of their PCs aren’t running antivirus software, how many software applications aren’t fully patched, and other similar issues. An “insights” feature in the tool highlights the specific problems holding a customer’s score back while a reporting feature helps MSPs show clients how each specific hardware upgrade or software change they recommend will improve their score.
Together, those tools pull together data available in the ScalePad platform before and make it more meaningful for both MSPs and their customers, according to Dan Wensley, the vendor’s CEO.
“We’ve had this great reporting in our system and a lot of partners have had great success with it,” he says. “Now we’ve taken it to the next level where it’s more tangible because it’s got a scorecard attached to it.”
MSPs can use that metric as the basis for setting an improvement target with a customer, defining a concrete plan for reaching that goal, and measuring progress to date during or between quarterly business reviews.
“It’s a way to get that client involved in a shared accountability framework,” says Luis Giraldo, ScalePad’s chief experience officer. “Bringing the client back into this conversational way of approaching strategy is quite powerful.”
MSPs receive a maturity score of their own based on the collective state of their client base. According to Wensley the average maturity score across ScalePad’s nearly 10,000 partners is currently 662, which is at the high end of “fair” on a ranking hierarchy that fits companies into poor, fair, good, very good, and excellent buckets. Partners using the paid “pro” edition of ScalePad, as opposed to a free edition with reduced functionality, score 729 on average, which is toward the high end of “good”.
Backup Radar’s solution provides a centralized view of backup status information to channel pros with clients using multiple BDR products.
“We’ve met MSPs that are managing three, four, five different backup platforms at any given time, Giraldo says. “The reporting across that many different backup platforms starts to become a little bit tedious and difficult to manage.” Helping MSPs ease that headache, he continues, essentially adds data asset management to ScalePad’s hardware and software asset management offerings.
ScalePad’s purchase of Backup Radar, which currently has nearly 1,000 partners monitoring over 375,000 backups daily for more than 23,000 client organizations, has closed. Patrick Leonard, the company’s founder and former CEO, has exited the business, but the rest of his organization will remain onboard. ScalePad will run the company as an independent subsidiary under its original name.
“It strengthens our platform capability and message that we’re helping you standardize, strengthen, and automate the assets that you’re managing for your client,” Wensley says of the acquisition. “That now includes data.”
Originally named Warranty Master, ScalePad’s first product was designed to help users not only track warranty status on managed devices but generate incremental revenue by identifying aging hardware potentially in need of replacement or extended warranty coverage. The company adopted its current name last October in conjunction with the launch of a similar service for managing software renewals. Its purchase of Backup Radar comes some four months after the announcement of a non-controlling investment in the company by private equity investor Integrity Growth Partners.
ScalePad currently has roughly 9,000 partners serving half a million SMBs with some 60 million assets under management. The company was among the recipients of this year’s ChannelPro All-Star awards.
