BitTitan's Expanded MSPComplete Is All About the Playbook
BitTitan is taking another big step in offering prescriptive guidance for Microsoft partners and other IT service providers with the release this week of an overhauled MSPComplete.
The Seattle-area company's suite is shifting from suggesting potential upselling opportunities to offering a full set of more than 100 customizable playbooks.
Those playbooks, or runbooks, are preconfigured sets of standard operating procedures within BitTitan's platform that a partner's service team can step through to perform many kinds of IT service projects, even ones that the engineers may not be completely familiar with at the start. The idea is to expand an MSP's revenue-generating services and improve the quality level and reliability of what engineers do on behalf of the MSP.
BitTitan first released MSPComplete in 2015 as a suite of products to help MSPs transition customers from on-premises servers to cloud services, so the suite included BitTitan tools for e-mail migration, document migration, configuration of Outlook, Azure assessments and other functions.
"Our next version is a platform that orchestrates end-to-end delivery of a project," said Geeman Yip, CEO of BitTitan.
With its close associations to Microsoft, many of those projects are related to Office 365, FastTrack, Azure, OneDrive and other Microsoft products and tools. But the new MSPComplete Service Library also involves migration and turnkey services for Dropbox Business, Amazon, Box and Google G Suite, among others.
Some examples of the out-of-the-box service playbooks available immediately include On-premise Exchange to Office 365, HealthCheck for Office 365, Troubleshoot Restrictions and Limits, Configure Microsoft Outlook, Set up SharePoint Online sites, Perform an Azure ROI Assessment, Perform Public Folder Migration, Generate a Software Inventory Report, Discover Azure VM Utilization, SaaS App Integration with Azure Active Directory Marketplace, Apply a Legal Hold to a Office 365 User, and Office 365 Mailbox Migration.
The suite also permits customization, allowing companies to add their own intellectual property to the workflows that their engineers will step through. For example, one of BitTitan's MSP customers might create a playbook of "FastTrack Onboarding Guidance" or an "Employee Onboarding Checklist" or "Install Office Mobile Apps."
[Click on image for larger view.] In the Feed view of MSPComplete, managers can now quickly see the status of projects across all of their customers. (Source: BitTitan.)
Because an MSP's engineers perform their work through MSPComplete, the platform can provide other services useful to that MSP's management. Managers can gather metrics from the tool about how long each engineer spent on each step in a playbook to get a better sense of how long different parts of projects take or for employee training. Managers can also gain visibility into precisely where each customer's project stands. Finally, by entering information about how much each employee costs per hour, managers can determine how much certain services are costing them to deliver.
Christopher Hertz, former president of two-time Microsoft U.S. Partner of the Year New Signature, consulted with BitTitan on development of this update to MSPComplete and sees two main groups of partners who could benefit from the approach.
One group is smaller partner companies who aren't offering managed services yet, but are getting pressure to transition into MSPs from Microsoft, whose help comes in the form of overwhelming, 200-page guides.
"If I don't have managed services today for Office 365, and I'm worried about how do I price it, and how do I talk to my customers about it, and marry that with the ability for my team to actually deliver against that, this does all those things," Hertz said.
The other group is existing MSPs who want more reliable delivery but struggle to maintain up-to-date processes.
"It was always expensive to maintain playbooks or checklists because the world shifts pretty rapidly in cloud services. One problem is those were expressed in Word documents. A few things would happen. They would inevitably go out of date," Hertz said. "If you're a small MSP or even a midsize one, trying to maintain a comprehensive list of these best practices and putting them into standard operating procedure guidance is almost impossible to do when you think about how broad and how deep and how complex it is today with cloud services. You can get scale in that way with BitTitan in a way you just can't do as an individual partner."
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 06, 2017