- Because of the pandemic, many businesses opted for cloud-based platforms and SaaS services.
- Meantime, IT service providers are either looking to scale their services or are employing a new platform to instill the extensibility of their platform.
The pandemic has shifted the way businesses will consume IT services. Because of this, the vendors and IT service providers are looking to raise the capital to back the consumption of IT services. With the passage of time, organizations are looking to rely upon service providers from external sources. And the IT service providers are looking to accelerate the transition of IT services to cloud-based platforms. This kind of shift requires a large amount of investment. Electric AI, the IT tech support provider, has managed to raise $40 million in series C funding. This will be used to scale the adoption of IT services for small to medium-scale businesses (SMBs).
Not only IT service providers are looking for funding, but platform providers that IT service providers depend on, are also looking to raise capital. Altera, who provides a platform for the delivery of the managed services, has successfully raised $25 million from K1 Investment Management. Simultaneously, ScienceLogic who is a provider of an IT platform raised $105 million successfully. They did this as an effort to instill more AIOps capabilities into its platform.
Rise of Cloud Platform
Since the last few years, IT service providers have counted on client-server platforms that third-party vendors provide. These vendors include ConnectWise, Kaseya, SolarWinds, and ScienceLogic which is at the higher end of the market. But these platforms have displayed their inability in terms of management and extensibility. Warwick Burns, the owner of Warwick Data Solutions based in Nashville, Tennessee, decided to pick out Atera’s cloud platform. Atera’s cloud platform happens to be a rival to ConnectWise. Warwick thinks that Atera’s cloud platform is a small provider of IT services and his company didn’t have time and resources to learn and maintain such a complex platform. “We learned how to use the Atera platform in a day,” Burns said. “The other platforms are a big clunky mess”.
This issue gives birth to an opportunity where the current providers are snatched away of their powers. It is widely employed by IT service providers, says Atera CEO Gil Peckelman. Atera is a cloud-based platform. It integrates the Remote Management and Monitoring (RMM) and Professional Services Automation (PSA). IT service providers use this through which they manage multiple clients in a more accessible way.
Extensibility of platforms
Atera plans to raise a round of fundings to provide an analytics facility to analyze the data collected by their platforms. This will enable the IT services to work with increased efficiency, Peckelman said. He says, “Our IP is our software and our data”. Similarly, Augmentt has come up as a startup that focuses heavily on enabling IT service providers the management of multiple SaaS applications on behalf of their customers. Organizations are heavily relying on SaaS because of the COVID-19 pandemic situation. Augmentt chairman, Gavin Garbutt says that it has become obvious that IT service providers require a platform to manage SaaS functions.
New York based Electric has taken up a different course. The IT service provider has made a lot of efforts for the extension of the IT management platforms from Kaseya and Jamf to provide services for Windows and Apple respectively. It offers software to streamline and consolidate the workflow through its automation framework. It creates a self-servicing framework using which end users can provision applications and programs with zero intervention from IT service providers, said Electric CEO, Ryan Denehy.
Electric made the decision to code the software to extend its current backend IT management platforms. On the other hand, Warwick Data Solutions, opted for a new platform because of absence of in-house software development capability. Irrelevant to the platform, IT service providers will modernize the management of IT using AIOps for instance. Such a shift will need increased dependence on cloud platforms that offer accessibility to the data required to train AI. IT leaders will bet on how long will the IT service providers take to move down the course.