It seems only yesterday that BitTitan emerged as an up and coming data transfer company with a heavy focus on Microsoft solutions, offering services such as OneDrive and Office 365 migrations.
Today, the company is heavily shifting its image to becoming an MSP enablement company, albeit one that is continuing its relationship with the Redmond software giant.
To do so, it has been watching market trends, especially those set by its partner, and trying to help align Microsoft’s enormous channel network along those lines.
Take Microsoft’s more recent shift away from Office 365 and email to Azure.
According to Rocco Seyboth, vice president and general manager of products at BitTitan, thousands of partners have built a business around what has become a commoditized practice. With Microsoft retiring subsidies for email and Office 365 and offering them instead for Azure, companies aren’t sure how to adapt.
Nor do they know how to transition to the managed model, he said.
“Most of our partners are small businesses, most of them are technologists, and the issue is that issue in growing is that they are not sales guys,” Seyboth said. “Once they have used up all the referral opportunities, where do they go?”
BitTitan decided to address these issues, one at a time. The company has created solutions around three pillars under its MSPComplete platform, which are Sell, Onboard, and Service. It has created solutions around leadgen for partners, workshops around showing ROI and diagnostics to customers, it even created an Azure Starter Kit in December.
Now, five months into its efforts, is coming out with solutions around Service.
The first, called Concierge, is fairly straightforward. Essentially a white-label customer service hotline, BitTitan will provide 24/7 tech support for customers of their partners. The service promises to be low-cost and includes support for Tier 1 to 3, as well as for any IT or cloud service, Office 365 user desktops and hardware.
Meanwhile, MissionControl for Office 365 is an advanced mangaement tool designed to allow partners to offer the solution using a managed model. It’s meant to allow for compliance, auditing, alerting and reporting for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and all other Office 365 workloads, eliminate the need for PowerShell, and improve security and compliance with alerts and reports.
“If you look at the customer today, they can buy Office 365 from any partner – there’s a lot of demand for it,” Seyboth said. “How do they differentiate their version of Office 365? That’s where managed services come in.”
As for whether he sees email migration going away, to Seyboth says it’s a clear no, explaining that there are still more customers running exchange on-premise than on 365, and that the best partners are calculating the cost of the migration, and charging it monthly so that there appears to be no upfront cost.
But as for BitTitan, the data migration front may be a thing of the past.
“If you want to start a new MSP and want to make money with Office 365 from day one … we’ll help you migrate, help you sell it, and maintain that relationship,” Seyboth said. “We think of ourselves as a business in a box for MSP.”
