Continuum this week announced it had acquired BrightGauge, a provider of business intelligence tools designed specifically for managed services providers (MSPs), to augment its namesake MSP management platform.
MSPs continually have access to massive amounts of data that they have no easy way to consume, says Continuum CEO Michael George.
“There’s a lot of noise,” says George. “Some information MSPs need to pay attention to it; some of it they need to ignore.”
The BrightGauge BI tools were developed originally in 2011 by an MSP that was trying to discern what services they provided were the most profitable, says George. Since then over 1,300 MSPs now use the BrightGauge tools to manage their business both daily and over the long term, says George.
Continuum plans to continue to make those tools available as a stand-alone offering. But MSPs that have standardized on its MSP platform will be able to more easily feed data into the BrightGauge tools over time, says George.
In total, MSPs employing the Continuum platform for remote monitoring and management now have over 1.25 million endpoints under management, which George says is increasing at a rate of 500 to 1,000 every day. That approach essentially eliminates the need for MSPs to build their own help desks and network operations centers, notes George. Continuum now has over 5,800 partners, says George.
Long term, Continuum expects to increasingly apply machine learning algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) to the data to enable MSPs to further automate processes, adds George.
It’s been apparent for some time now that an arguably overdue convergence of MSP operational and professional services automation tools is now underway. How MSPs will go about unifying these tools will vary depending on what tool was acquired when and the willingness of any MSP to adopt a new platform versus integrating their existing tools. The one thing that is certain is the MSPs that make the investment required to unify those tools have a much better chance of survival than those that fail to modernize their processes.
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