LogicNow Opens a Big Data Chapter for MSPs

LogicNow wants to bring big data analytics capabilities to even the smallest of MSPs.

At its MAX 2015 conference that started Wednesday near Washington, D.C., LogicNow announced a new core technology called LOGICcards. The "cards" are toast-like notifications that appear in an MSP's remote monitoring and management (RMM) dashboard, providing warnings of configuration problems, security issues and other pitfalls that could lead to downtime for the customer and reduced profitability for an MSP.

In his conference keynote, LogicNow General Manager Alistair Forbes said LOGICcards will go beyond using rules based on the specific configuration at an individual customer site. In addition to that information, the LOGICcards will use algorithms to apply machine learning to troves of data drawn from LogicNow's massive installed base and stored in the company's Amazon Web Services (AWS) data stores. According to the Edinburgh, U.K.-based company, its nearly 13,000 MSPs are managing 175,000 networks and 2 million endpoints and processing some 12 billion e-mails, and the algorithms will extract patterns from that data.

"In essence, LOGICcards embeds a data science capability within every one of our MSP customers," Forbes said at the show. "It's like having an analyst in your business that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week to identify improvement opportunities."

From an MSP-to-customer conversation standpoint, the data will allow MSPs to present impressively predictive and prescriptive scenarios to customers, said David Sobel, director of partner community for LogicNow. "I've done my analysis and these are the things that are going to happen to you in the next quarter," Sobel said as an example of what the tool could allow an MSP to tell a customer.

Some of the "cards" will present best practice-style comparisons. For example, Sobel said, an MSP who can show that a customer's preferred timetable for patching servers is in the bottom 22 percent of all environments has a much stronger case to influence that customer to change their policy.

Forbes said a first batch of LOGICcards is available immediately. MSPs who use the MAXfocus RMM product only need to visit a URL and fill out four fields to get started.

LogicNow presents MSPs with a basic set of cards and uses algorithms to tailor which cards appear in the future depending on how an MSP responds to the prompts. If an MSP regularly ignores a certain type of alert, it will no longer appear, Forbes said. Reacting to other cards will cause cards with similar warnings or related types of information to begin to appear, he said.

LogicNow plans to roll out more cards as they are developed. The company planned to present its product roadmap, including more details on the LOGICcards, to partners on Thursday.

Posted by Scott Bekker on September 10, 2015