Clarity Brings Analytics as a Service Into Focus

Managed services providers know all too well success lies in differentiation. And in this brave new services world, it sometimes can be difficult to make your company stand out among its competitors.

Enter analytics as a service.

What once was the purview of large enterprises with big data capabilities wrapped within their data center operations, analytics as a service is now available downstream for MSPs to offer their SMB customers, thanks to Clarity Channel Advisors’ Clarity Intelligence Platform.

“MSPs need to add more value to their client relationships—they need to be more consultative, but no one has given them the tools to do it,” said Jim Lippie, chief advisor at Clarity Channel Advisors. “We focused on building a platform that gives MSPs the ability to be trusted advisor, be more consultative.” And do it on a scale that provides meaningful yet not overwhelming information to small business to help them measure their progress against themselves and benchmark against like companies.

The Clarity Intelligence Platform focuses on three main areas—Finance, IT/Operations and Sales and Marketing. Using charts and graphs, the platform offers both high-level and granular views of a company’s business. For example, under the Finance menu, companies can look at revenue, cost of goods sold, gross margin, expenses, net income, revenue per employee and more.

“Our goal is to provide MSPs with the ability to offer their customers a lot of meaningful information about their business right now,” Lippie said.

The platform enables MSPs to create recurring reports on the status of their customers’ business, including comparison reports for specific time periods, and offers benchmarking reports against other users in the system.

“MSPs can offer customers a look at their own business and the industry average,” Lippie noted. “The information comes from all clients with like businesses that are on the platform. That’s one of the great things about this platform—it is community-driven.”

And because it is community-driven, Clarity can afford to offer it to MSPs for $12 per company per month. And that’s after the 90-day free trial.

“It’s community-driven to drive more value into an MSP’s client relationships. There is power with community and numbers,” Lippie said. “We feel this is a great added solution MSPs can deliver that they won’t get anywhere else for the same cost.

“This is specifically designed for the managed services community,” he added.

The Clarity Intelligence Platform currently integrates with Independence IT’s Cloud Workspace platform, and Lippie said there are plans to integrate with other platforms “if it’s helpful to MSP community.

“Our goal is to be the ubiquitous analytics as a service platform specifically for MSPs,” he said.