BitTitan Unveils The Next-Gen Version Of Its Managed Services Automation Platform

BitTitan on Tuesday released a major update to its platform for powering delivery of managed services, a solution the company says helps legacy partners convert their practices to capture cloud-based revenue streams.

The standout Microsoft-aligned ISV, based in Kirkland, Wash., offers popular migration and management tools used by 11,000 solution providers. The latest release of its MSPComplete platform takes a more vendor-agnostic posture and adds a range of automation capabilities, said Mark Kirstein, BitTitan's vice president of product.

"While many partners say they are MSPs, many are really struggling to figure that out. We want to help our partners become what we consider modern MSPs, where there's that cloud-first vision and focus," Kirstein said.

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It was with a vision of implementing those upgrades to the platform that BitTitan, bootstrapped since its inception, finally accepted venture funding last summer to the tune of $15 million.

"All MSPs have valuable IP today in the unique way they deliver projects and managed services," Kirstein said, adding that the struggle to make those processes repeatable drove development of the latest version of the platform.

The updates to MSPComplete were focused on driving recurring revenue, protecting and developing intellectual property, and increasing profit margins, Kirstein said.

Chris Hertz, an advisor to BitTitan who founded Microsoft partner New Signature, described the latest release of MSPComplete as "essentially a managed services provider in a box."

Hertz knows from first-hand experience how transforming a practice from project work to a recurring-revenue model can overwhelm solution providers. Decisions about how to price, bundle, and train engineers are so difficult; "a lot of providers say I'm not even going to try."

The latest MSPComplete blazes a simplified path toward becoming a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) and opens the door to selling many new cloud services, Hertz told CRN.

One innovation is the introduction of playbooks that can be customized to run processes at the scale and scope that small services providers just can't do manually.

For MSPs, the "challenge is to make technology invisible to the customers," Kirstein said. "They just want the technology to work, and failure really isn't an option."

Matt O’Donnell, CEO at Bellevue, Wash.-based Attunix, launched a managed services practice recently on the back of BitTitan's MSPComplete platform.

Attunix, a cloud solution provider focused on Microsoft Azure, wanted to help clients gain more value from the cloud. MSPComplete enabled the Microsoft partner to convert strategic, project-based work into high-touch, ongoing engagements.

"MSPComplete gives us a couple [of] efficiencies that we were really looking for in our business," O'Donnell told CRN. "At a basic level, it gives us the ability to scale how we engage with customers, or initiate projects, or handle the management process."

The platform was able to ingest the company's management processes and create from them a repeatable system that was independent of what employees were available to run them.

"It starts codifying the things that we think are special about how we engage with a client," he said.

The platform also delivers insights that BitTitan has gained from working with thousands of other cloud-focused solution providers.

"We gain value from the things they're seeing from the other partners," O'Donnell said.