For all of our 13-year history, one of Blazent’s top client groups has been Managed Service Providers (MSPs). That group of professionals has always had a tough job—keeping up with technology advances while meeting the needs of an increasingly demanding client base—but it’s gotten even tougher in the past few years, with the advent of ‘Big Data’. And it will get even tougher in the coming years, as ‘The Internet of Things’ comes online.
MSPs Facing Both Historic and New Challenges
In talking to our MSP clients, we find that some of their requirements of partners like Blazent remain constant: they need to maximize their own profit margins while delivering the kind of competitive value that distinguishes them from their competition. And some of it is new, such as developing expertise in the Cloud and Big Data so that they can advise and integrate these capabilities into their own strategies and client implementations.
On the other side of the equation, their clients are realizing that data—and specifically the IT infrastructure and the results it can yield—can be a major differentiator and competitive advantage. They tell their MSPs that they want to be able to offer ‘everything as a service’. And they want to be able to make sense of what they have (and how to optimize it) from a single, integrated solution—not a hodge-podge of stand-alone tools.
Blazent’s Response: Data Intelligence
All of the above has guided Blazent over the past two years as we’ve recreated ourselves and our technology to deliver ‘data intelligence’ to our enterprise clients and to our MSP partners. The result is the Blazent Data Intelligence Platform, the first platform built from the ground up to assess, very and certify the quality of over 240 data types. As the only resource that can guarantee ‘total data quality’ it’s an essential component to any MSP strategy.
In the coming weeks you’ll hear more about our MSP strategy and offerings. But for now I just wanted to take this opportunity to tell you that the past 13 years have just been prelude: we look forward to combining our technology with our MSP partners’ expertise to raise the concept of ‘service’ to a dynamic new level.