BitTitan Packages Cloud Transition 'in a Box' for Microsoft Partners

One of the great challenges of the cloud transition for Microsoft partners is turning businesses that have been focused on server upgrade projects into recurring revenue-focused selling machines. Would it be possible to bundle that process into an in-a-box solution?

BitTitan is trying with a pair of Microsoft-focused offerings released this month called MSPComplete and a specialized version called CSPComplete, which is for the elite new group of Microsoft Cloud Service Provider (CSP) 1-Tier resellers.

"We provide the end-to-end solution to take someone from a systems integrator to a managed service provider," said Geeman Yip, CEO of BitTitan.

To date, BitTitan has been known for its Office 365 migration automation tools, which many Microsoft partners use to move customers from on-premises servers or from competing cloud services to the Microsoft cloud. Those tools, like MigrationWiz and DesktopWiz, are a part of the new MSPComplete offering.

Arguably more important in the partner transition to cloud than technical tools is the business process-related side, and Yip believes there's a role for BitTitan there, as well.

"I think there are people who will give you education around each one of these things, but education, as we know, over the last five years is not enough. We feel we can automate a good amount of this lifecycle so you only need to put in human intervention when necessary," he said.

Now BitTitan is putting its existing tools in an "onboard" pillar of MSPComplete and surrounding that pillar with two new sets of offerings -- one grouped in a "sell" pillar and another in a "service" pillar.

On the sell side, BitTitan has an internally developed SalesAutomation platform that consists of leads and scripts and an Estimator tool for up-selling/cross-selling, quotes, statements of work, and incentives and promotions.

On the service side, BitTitan is creating a HealthCheck tool with up-sell/cross-sell opportunities and is rolling out complementary products, such as e-mail archiving, data encryption and cloud management.

For the sales leads, BitTitan is using Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning to build out customer lists. "It's basically internal data mining," Yip said. "We crawl the Internet. We mine people's Web sites, we mine records, everything that's accessible from the Internet. We try to gather information from social media, et cetera, build a business profile about [a customer]. Discover what services that you advertise on the Internet."

Early efforts, both in scripts and in customer leads, are focused on the Microsoft Exchange migration opportunity. "The initial lowest hanging fruit is going to be around e-mail," Yip said. "We're currently working with Microsoft to load in scripts around CRM and Lync...and on OneDrive, competing with Box and Dropbox."

BitTitan's Estimator tool will pull in data from the Microsoft's incentives system to allow the partner sales team to give customers the best available offers and prices.

Jeffrey Tinnea, a technical program manager at BitTitan, said automatically pulling incentives will help many more partners use them. Tinnea, a former Microsoft employee, says many partners currently fail to take advantage of incentives. "It's not because partners don't qualify; it's because they don't know."

One of BitTitan's early MSPComplete partner/customers is ZAG Technical Services, a multi-competency Microsoft partner headquartered in San Jose, Calif. In an e-mail interview, Joe Foos, director of sales and marketing at ZAG, said, "The new MSPComplete enablement platform offers experienced Microsoft Office 365 migration service providers the opportunity to shorten the sales cycle significantly. It also works to accelerate the on-boarding, migration and Microsoft license usage activities that help customers start seeing real value from their investment right away."

Posted by Scott Bekker on October 28, 2015