In this episode of LogicTalks, Mark Banfield, Chief Revenue Officer at LogicMonitor, sits down with Justin Cawood, Director of International Managed Services Operations at Logicalis Group, to discuss how Logicalis, a managed services provider, has evolved the way they monitor their customer’s infrastructures around the globe with LogicMonitor. Justin explains how LogicMonitor has allowed them to quickly discover and onboard new clients and infrastructures, consolidate tools and learnings across the global organization, and help Logicalis’ customers to transition to cloud and hybrid environments and excel while working from home. Justin also speaks about the evolving future of managed services, in which customers are beginning to operate in an outcome-based mindset and how MSPs need to adapt to meet those needs.
Video Transcription
Mark Banfield – Hello everyone and welcome to LogicMonitor’s LogicTalks. A conversation with industry experts and really innovative customers of LogicMonitor deep diving into the topics and technologies that make IT so crucial to the modern business world. Thanks for joining me, my name is Mark Banfield. I’m Chief Revenue Officer here at LogicMonitor. We have a really exciting conversation for you today. I’m joined by Justin Cawood, who is Operations Director of International Managed Services at Logicalis. Logicalis a global managed service provider. In his 20 years of tenure with Logicalis. Justin has been instrumental in architecting and implementing a variety of key systems, processes, and operational frameworks. His efforts in structuring Logicalis’, digital service platform, has resulted in true consistency in the way that service management is delivered to customers across the globe, allowing for improved operational efficiency, scalability, and quality throughout the entire portfolio globally. Thank you for joining us Justin and welcome to LogicTalks.
Justin Cawood – Hi Mark, thanks, great to be here.
Onboarding and Monitoring Customer’s Diverse Infrastructures
Mark Banfield – Great, so let’s dive straight in. With such a wide breadth of customers, each having their own unique infrastructure, different use cases, different needs. What was some of the major hurdles you faced in monitoring your customer’s infrastructure? And how does switching to the LogicMonitor help solve those pain points?
Justin Cawood – One of the main challenges we face or have faced historically, is the ability to do dependency mapping, because to be there for an MSP, you’re not managing the entire environment. So you have a subset of the customer’s environment that gets a contractor due for management. So that first step of using to discover, and show the customer what they have is crucial, and what we built is a tight integration between LogicMonitor and our service management, so that we can bring that discovered data into our system, have a conversation with a customer, and then once they contract with us, we significantly speed up the onboarding, because the data’s already in our CMDB. And we just flag which CIS and devices they want managed, and then we move forward into the next stage without a lengthy process of gathering data through spreadsheets. And then in terms of typology and root cause, we again had [LogicMonitor] discover the entire environment for the system to be able to do those kinds of things. I’ll get into a bit more of this later, but LogicMonitor facilitates us to do machine learning and clustering, which solves a lot of those problems. So a combination of using the typology that’s built into LogicMonitor, and then using the data that is fed into our data lake and turning on machine learning, the combination of those things, enables us to do root cause and clustering which is huge when you’re dealing with the types of volumes that we’re dealing with.
Endpoint Onboarding and Management at Scale
Mark Banfield – So Justin, regarding the volume of devices that you’re using LogicMonitor to manage, could you talk about that? But also, in terms of onboarding new customers, specifically, how much more efficient is that?
Justin Cawood – Yeah, sure, Mark the scale’s pretty big, I mean, we are currently contracted for 20,000 devices and we’re growing into that rapidly, at a few thousand a week. So we’re gonna use up the capacity fast, and then, when we bring on other regions, we’ll probably be in the 35 to 40,000 range pretty quickly. So the scale is pretty high and that’s why, to the conversation around onboarding, with that kind of scaler devices, the fast onboarding and the ability to do discovery, and the integration between our service management and LogicMonitor is crucial. Even after we’ve discovered a device, we can turn on the monitoring from our CMDB, from the customer record without having to go back and forth between tools. So that ability that LogicMonitor has given us access to do that is huge. And then the discovery, the fast discovery for onboarding, is also significant, tasks that would take us a few weeks to do in the past, can be done within minutes.
Importance of Tool Consolidation across a Global Managed Services Provider
Mark Banfield – So Justin tool sprawl can easily overwhelm support teams, especially when an incident occurs. How important was it for you to be able to consolidate monitoring tools into a single platform and a single pane of glass?
Justin Cawood – Yeah, no, it’s true Mark. And to exasperate tool sprawl, we have multiple regions. So Logicalis operates in 26 countries. And in many of those countries, there was independent tool use. And with LogicMonitor, we were able to consolidate all of that globally, which is not just preventing tools sprawl and cost redundancies and things like that. But we’re now able to operate in a consolidated fashion. So our integrations that we build, and all the developments that we do, are now leveraged globally, because we start with that common monitoring tool. So everybody’s running on the same instance of LogicMonitor, sharing learnings, sharing standards. So the benefit that we’re getting from a effort on one tool is huge, not to mention the savings and infrastructure.
Operational Benefits and Customer Experience
Mark Banfield – So we talked a lot about benefits, were specifically around operational benefits. What are some of the things you’ve seen for your internal teams, as well as fuel customers?
Justin Cawood – The reporting is fantastic, the dashboarding, we extend that to our customers through our portals. So everything we’re seeing, all the analytics and history and trending that we see, the customers can see as well. So yeah, the user experiences is a significant step up.
Helping Customers Transition to Work from Home
Mark Banfield – Great so we’ve been going through a tough period with the coronavirus. How has Logicalis helping its customers transition to remote working.
Justin Cawood – From day one, we internally, we transitioned everybody to work from home, and we have huge operation centers all over the world. So that was a very significant effort, that we’re able to achieve very quickly. And part of that is because we use SAS tools, and everybody has remote access. So internally it was a very quick, in fact most places we did that within one week. Then we, at the same time built new propositions for our customers, focused on work from home capabilities, remote access, security, all that kind of stuff. And it’s actually been significant. I hate to say this, but we’re actually doing quite well, because of the demand on our technology.
How Managed Services are Adapting to Outcome Based Solutions
Mark Banfield – Yeah, that’s awesome. And you’re very right that the managed service market, is undergoing significant change, driven two fold, one by the fact that there is now these modern technologies that allow you to change the way that you service customers, but also the demands of your customers are changing. And the expectations are changing. We live in an era where expectations are from every part of that life is that technology just works all the time, every time without any downside. Talk to us a little bit about how you see Managed Services changing in the coming years, because there’s a very dynamic space, is a very fast growing space, and you’re right at the forefront of it, with what you’re doing with AIOps How do you see the market changing in the next three to five years?
Justin Cawood – Yeah It’s a good question. Mark, I think more and more, whether it be Managed Services or anything else in technology, I think we’re gonna see a trend to outcome-based solutions right? So, I think customers are gonna expect the same from us as an MSP, and more and more they’re gonna contract a business outcome. So, in the past used to see server, you would negotiate with a customer to say, I will manage your server, and when something breaks I’ll fix it next time. Now we’re saying, give me a virtual machine in a cloud. I don’t care about the server. I don’t care about the CPU in there. Just give me an outcome, which is that server needs to run and perform at a certain speed and deliver the result I need. Now you’re seeing SAS on top of that saying, give me an application that does X to give me an outcome. So I think with managed services, we’re gonna see more and more of that. I don’t want to know about all the server and the SLS, just commit to give me an outcome. So I think we’re gonna see more of that, keep my business running thinking, and spare me the complexity of all the details, I don’t want to know about the details, just commit to give me that outcome.
Transformation to Cloud and Agnostic Monitoring
Mark Banfield – You’ve touched upon cloud there, which is obviously, we’re in a period of massive cloud transformation. How is Logicalis seeing that transformation with your customers? How much now of what you do start seeing cloud versus on-prem?
Justin Cawood – Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right, Mark. I mean, we’re seeing a massive migration to the cloud. There was hesitation a few years ago, as you know, there were all kinds of barriers to security and people were nervous about it, and they were only putting their non-prod stuff into the cloud. Now we’re seeing the opposite, people that were hesitant in the past, have broken that barrier. And it’s now a case of not if I wanna get there, but can you help me get there, because I have some complexities, the LogicMonitor stuff we’re doing, is, makes that transparent, it doesn’t matter where the customer is, on prem or in the cloud, whether it be in Azure, in AWS, wherever they are, it makes no difference, right? No matter where they are or which cloud they are, which country they in.
Benefits of a Multi-tenant, Single Instance Monitoring Platform
Mark Banfield – Can you talk a little bit about two fold. One is from a technology perspective, how a SAS platform that’s multi-tenancy, helps you deliver Managed Services. And secondly, from a commercial standpoint, how we’re working with you from a partnership standpoint, to make sure that we can support you as an MSP, as opposed to an end user IT organization.
Justin Cawood – Yeah, sure, So firstly, the multi-tenancy and MSP aspect is critical to us. the ability to have a single instance that we manage globally, but allow each country or region to have a space in there, to carve it up as many ways as you want, is absolutely critical. So we get the benefit of sharing all of our data source, work and development, but still being able to have independent views. So admins in one country can just view their customers. So it’s huge. The second part of the question that Mark the partnership, not only has it been great technology, but you guys have proven to be a really, really great partner. And I know it’s gonna sound like I was almost paid to say that because I’m probably quite passionate about this but, seriously that the relief, when we had questions or needed help, even now with the AIOps stuff, we’re ingesting huge volumes of data into a data Lake. And we’re working with you guys, on ways that we can make that more efficient. And there’s never been a question of, I’m sorry, that’s the way it works, go read the document or anything like that. It’s always been a case of, hey, we hear you, we’ll work with you, and let’s figure this out. And it’s been amazing just to see the level of partnership that you guys have brought to the table. It really feels like a partnership as opposed to a vendor relationship.
Mark Banfield – Well, we enjoy the partnership too, and it’s been a very fruitful one and continues to be so, well, thank you Justin for the time taken, thanks for your candid feedback and thoughts on not only logic models about the MSP market in general. And if you would like to learn more about Justin’s journey or anything about LogicMonitor, please visit our website, www.logicmonitor.com