Technology Reseller - v25

01732 759725 26 MANAGED SERVICES With David Thomas, Managing Director of Bluegrass Group experience and we are the right company to go to’. Over the years that’s changed: we’ve grown from just 4 people to 31; we’ve got 120 clients around the UK; we have a main office in Exeter and a small office in Birmingham; we’re an MSP with a full range of services, 24/7, 365. Technology Reseller (TR): Going back to that lightbulb moment; you had no experience or qualifications, what was your starting point? DT: Three of us were technical anyway. I was a programmer in years gone by and I had two other guys who liked taking computers apart and fixing them. Between the three of us we had sufficient knowledge to be able to offer a solution. TR : What did you offer initially? DT: To start with, we offered break/fix. The two principles we established right from the start were that anything we offered had to be of high quality, because service was key, and that we would put 24/7 monitoring in place. Twelve years ago, 24/7 monitoring was something that tended to be done by larger organisations, but we knew from our perspective, as a receiver of IT support, that that was important. They were the principles on which we moved forward. That’s basically the story we told – we had been a receiver of IT support; we know what it’s like to get bad support; so trust us. TR: And you found people who were prepared to do that. DT: It was a leap of faith for them; they took that leap of faith and the business has grown from there. TR: Were your first customers people you had worked with previously on a consultancy basis or were they brand new to you? DT: They were brand new. With consultancy we were talking to large organisations that had their own IT departments. Our target market was SMEs. TR : How did you find them? Through friends? Advertising? DT: Just through marketing and making phone calls. A lot of what an MSP does is being in the right place, at the right time; Being the largest gathering of MSPs in Europe, DattoCon gave Technology Reseller the opportunity to spend time with the people who have the job of building relationships with (and selling services to) end user customers. What makes them tick? And how does the evolving Datto stack meet their needs? To find out we sat down with David Thomas, Managing Director of Bluegrass, the Exeter-based MSP, Datto EMEA Pioneer of The Year and organiser of Cyber Security Awareness Week. We started by asking David how he got into this game in the first place. David Thomas (DT): We originally started as a project management company and were quite successful, working for the likes of AXA, Cancer Research and Prudential. We outsourced our IT support, as businesses do – thankfully. Then in November 2007 we had a server crash. We had an urgent piece of work we had to get to a client who was giving a presentation at the end of the week. The crash happened on Tuesday; we had to get it to him on Friday. The IT company just didn’t comprehend the importance of that – ‘It’s just one person. Does it really matter?’. In the end we got the presentation written for him, but it was one of those light bulb moments – ‘Do you know what? We’ve moved around IT companies and we’ve never got one that really understands communication, the value of money and the significance of problems’. So, we changed overnight from being a consultancy to being an IT company. We had no experience; we were IT-based, but we had no qualifications; we had no clients; we had no processes. But we saw there was a niche and that was how Bluegrass started. The first client came on board in December 2007. We had this vision of what service should be about, and that is what we sold. We sold the vision as opposed to saying ‘We’ve got 10 years of Q&A David Thomas making that phone call at the point when the end client has an issue or has had an issue or has had frustrations. Then, you are pushing an open door. TR : How long have you had a relationship with Datto? DT: For five years, since 2014. TR : What led you to them? DT: We have always believed that we survive if our clients stay in business and that disaster recovery is key to every business, including ourselves. We looked at all kinds of different solutions and eventually chose one from a company I won’t name. We implemented it and it was fine. But in the background this company was constantly tinkering with the software, and there was a time when a client of ours had an issue and we couldn’t recover all their data. That’s a disaster. So we looked around the market and came across Datto. Five years ago, it was new, certainly in the UK. We tried it and we converted our clients to Datto. It was business continuity that we picked up first. TR : And you’ve never had any problems with Datto? DT: Never problems, no. There are always issues, but we’ve never not been able to recover a client’s data, whole system or whatever, when we’ve needed to. And when there has been an issue, the support has been great. As it needs to be. Our clients expect good support from us, so we expect good support from our partners, and Datto has provided it. TR : Since selecting Datto for business continuity, have you adopted more of its products? DT: We sell everything of Datto’s now. As they keep telling me, we sell ‘the whole stack’. We sell business continuity, networking solutions, SaaS protection. We also use their Autotask PSA and Datto RMM remote monitoring. We are fully invested in them. TR : Will you also take on their new product, Cloud Continuity (see page 24)? DT: Without a doubt. There are lots of businesses out there that don’t have a server infrastructure and aren’t backing continued...

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