Managed service provider Bell Techlogix shines its BEAM to differentiate

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1 Analyst: Katy Ring 1 Nov, 2013 Managed service provider Bell Techlogix shines its BEAM to differentiate Bell Techlogix is a midsized US managed service provider (MSP) that is ahead of the curve in getting its business model ready for the cloud era. Its approach blends traditional service provisioning with IT management as a service, all based on the Bell Techlogix Enterprise Architecture Management (BEAM) platform. The 451 Take ServiceNow has popularized ITSM provisioning in the cloud, and this approach is now gaining market traction. Cloud hosted service management is an emerging trend that piggybacks on this, and Bell Techlogix has invested in it by bringing BEAM as a Service (BaaS) to market, with its core based on BMC Remedy ITSM. It is a strategy born of buying best-of-breed tooling and integrating those tools with BMC Remedy, and then applying its homegrown intellectual property to the offering. Access is then provided to that ITSM capability via subscription and more traditional managed services. As such, Bell Techlogix is developing a pioneering business model for MSPs that should appeal to the midmarket buyer. Context Bell Techlogix is more than 25 years old, but has changed beyond recognition from the large technology distribution company it used to be. Over the past decade, it has become a full-service company focused on the US domestic market, targeting the upper midmarket buyer (those with Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 revenue ranging from $200m-2bn). It is backed by private equity from Newcastle Capital Management and forms the technology part of that company's diverse portfolio. Bell Techlogix moved into a new headquarters in Indianapolis in late 2012, and this is where its main delivery hub and innovation center are located. Bell Techlogix has around 1,000 employees and earns annual revenue of around $100m. The most mature part of its services portfolio is end-user computing, which accounts for around half of its managed services business, with the rest composed of infrastructure management services, IT lifecycle services (the asset management capability built up during its former life as an IT distribution company) and enterprise managed mobility services. It has market specializations in the commercial and public sectors, with its vertical focus spanning the healthcare and educational ecosystems, coupled with fairly broad reach into retail, financial services, manufacturing and so on. The company developed its own Bell Techlogix Enterprise Architecture Management service-delivery platform from commercially available toolsets, such as BMC Remedy, and integrated them to form a tooling product that provides more value for its customers than just logging, tracking and monitoring. In September it launched BEAM as a Service (BaaS), a commercial SaaS offering based on this investment in the system management and analytics tooling that it uses as an MSP. BEAM as a Service BEAM is a service-delivery management platform made available as a number of functional modules. These span helpdesk operations, knowledge management, network and system management, mobility management, analytics, and reporting. The platform includes automated call management based on VoIP and IP services management, the monitoring and management of incidents using ITIL and ITSM, and IT asset management using a CMDB. Knowledge management and a self-service portal are also provided. The BEAM services run on a private cloud, and while the commercial packaging is new, the company has taken its proven system management implementation and made it client-facing, providing complete support for the environment, including the management of third-party vendors and the licensing. On top of this, Bell Techlogix can add customized services for each customer. Business intelligence is provided via the company's Data Cube, which was launched more than a year ago. This creates the IT intelligence from the operations side, generating analytics around continual service improvement and problem root causes. In this way, Bell Techlogix can provide Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 generic operative KPI information around service improvement and ticket management. In other words, BaaS can offer a living repository of best practices. This is a really interesting development for midmarket customers because they typically have not had access to this kind of data before these pooled metrics and KPIs add real, ongoing value to the proposition. As a US domestic player, an offering such as BaaS enables Bell Techlogix to better compete with labor-arbitrage players because it means that the company can offer more cost-effective management services, providing consistent delivery that is location-independent. The approach also helps the company build a multi-skilled model it helps accelerate internal career paths, moving tier 1 support workers up to tier 2 and tier 3. It is then easier to develop a multi-skilled workforce by, say, taking a tier 2 service-desk agent and adding tier 2 mobility skills to their knowledge base. What's more, the exposure to more BI and CIO analytics means that the business acumen of the company's internal IT professionals is growing. Strategy Company president Anthony D'Ambrosi explains that the idea for BaaS was client-driven and came from requests from some anchor tenant clients. The company then worked with multiple third-party vendors to create a commercially viable offering, including terms of use, whether the tool is to be accessed via SaaS or via a dedicated license, and so on. He admits that the vendor management piece did prove quite complex Bell Techlogix had to put new legal and contracting vehicles in place so that the subscription looks like a product. This has meant modifying or enhancing partner contracts the company already had in place. D'Ambrosi says that some partners, such as RightAnswers, have been very helpful, wanting to know how to provision and grow the market. The vendor management agreements represent the financial engineering layer of abstraction between the client and the service, and it forms part of the value for which they are paying. Meanwhile, the client contract itself is a much simpler vehicle. While clients do have some options around tools, D'Ambrosi explains that this is not a raw technology platform, but an implementation of an existing platform that the company itself uses. BaaS is a base configuration including a suite of tools, but spot tooling can be added around the edge. The core ITSM engine is BMC Remedy, but other third-party tools can be integrated on a project basis. However, the strategy is for Bell Techlogix to extend the reach of its own platform, not to simply configure technology for a client. BaaS comes with prepackaged functionality designed by Bell Techlogix as an operating MSP, and the point of the proposition is to enable customers to access this intellectual property. Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 BaaS offers an external recurring revenue model for Bell Techlogix, which can now include a new or add-on SaaS sale rather than just a managed services sale. The company is offering a hybrid delivery model by providing both online software and manual services. This approach also enables clients to provide their own tier of service delivery. The company is targeting the US midmarket, a customer base that typically has no single system of record. The go-to-market approach is one of collaborative governance this does not need be a holistic outsource. Rather, Bell Techlogix is extending its platform to help customers deliver the service themselves to their end users. D'Ambrosi expects to see growth coming primarily from the stand-alone hub service subscriptions, followed by more custom projects for integration and customization. The idea is that Bell Techlogix sells the subscription and provides light managed services around BaaS, and then pulls through the opportunities. For this reason, buyers can subscribe to BaaS even if they are not currently Bell Techlogix clients. Sales Bell Techlogix is targeting the US small business and midmarket sector, as well as the education vertical, which often uses students as a source of low-cost labor. With BaaS these types of buyers can continue to use their own labor and get the benefit of a single system of record by subscribing to new services. In this way, Bell Techlogix expects to be able to offer this sector end-user computing and support, as well as datacenter operations and infrastructure management. Bell Techlogix is approaching the sale of BaaS like an outsourcing engagement requiring a transition service the company uses a methodology to define the service and the scope, and captures this as a transition plan. BaaS is not a 'buy today and switch on tomorrow' proposition, since every client has some unique requirements. D'Ambrosi says that this change order and integration project can take up to 90 days, depending upon the complexity of the environment. The company is now actively marketing BaaS to its installed base. Each managed service customer will have BEAM embedded in their delivery offering, and Bell Techlogix has the potential to offer additional value by providing new modules to customers on a subscription basis. BaaS is based on a service catalog approach customers subscribe to the catalog and can then be upsold or cross-sold managed services from that. The real business for Bell Techlogix is made from the value-added services surrounding BaaS, because its core business is as an MSP, not a SaaS company. Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 Bell Techlogix is typically looking for a three-year subscription to BaaS (but can offer a one-year subscription if required), along with a one-time fee for the transition, training and start-up. The subscription is then inclusive for all users, whether business or IT. Payment is a monthly fee based on a product price sheet. That fee is calculated depending on the functionality required and the scale of deployment. A reasonable mid- to upper-middle subscription for Bell Techlogix would be $50,000 per month. CIOs then divide this figure by users, devices and events for charge-back purposes. Competition The MSP space is currently undergoing a lot of disruption, including on the one hand the potential disintermediation from the customer that cloud delivery threatens, and on the other hand, the requirement to develop as-a-service skills to assist a customer base that requires the MSP to move up the value chain and become more of a business advisor. In the high-end US midmarket, competitors at this level include AT&T, CenturyLink/Savvis, CompuCom, Dimension Data and Rackspace. This just goes to demonstrate that, in many ways, Bell Techlogix is punching above its weight in the strategy it is developing. This is because offering ITMaaS involves a completely different way of working with technology vendors, and is not an approach the vast majority of MSPs would have the confidence to take. They simply do not have the experience or capabilities to develop the types of relationships required with both the customers and the partners to execute such a strategy. SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses Bell Techlogix is coming to market with a clearly differentiated approach to delivering services as an MSP in the cloud era. It is offering its target market capabilities that they do not currently have easy access to (best-practice KPIs) in a way that is palatable to how they operate (i.e., not a full outsource), but that also offers opportunities for the company to add value via its staff and its tooling. Selection of the right commercial models with technology vendor partners will prove crucial in enabling Bell Techlogix to continue to develop this mode of operation for its customers. Since the company is ahead of most of its peers, this could continue to prove challenging in the near to midterm. Opportunities Threats The growth opportunities look good once the company has some anchor client references ready for market consumption. In particular, this approach opens up the opportunity for Bell Techlogix to develop more segmented offerings for customers based on the knowledge it is accumulating via the Data Cube. Ultimately, the business model that Bell Techlogix is developing will become mainstream for many MSPs, so it needs to stay one step ahead and continue to innovate. In the short term, the main threat will be from buyers seeking to go directly to a subscription model with the ITSM technology vendors themselves. In particular, if BMC Remedy were to be sold to a service provider, that might throw up a wild card that could threaten the Bell Techlogix model. Copyright The 451 Group 5

6 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research's Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 6