MSP 501 Profile: Expedient’s Clients Span Several Industry Verticals

Company Name:  Expedient
Company MSP 101 Rank: 3
Senior Vice President & COO: Jonathan H. Rosenson
Headquartered: Pittsburgh, PA
Primary Services:

 Twitter: @Expedient

Expedient is a trusted IT adviser for businesses that span a number of industry verticals. From e-commerce and retail to health care and professional services, companies look to Expedient for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions that are tailored to their unique needs.

In addition, Expedient specializes in providing enterprise IT IaaS that complements the compliance requirements of companies doing business in any industry vertical. This includes providing assistance to clients with Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council (DSS) compliance process, GDPR compliance needs, HIPAA compliance and EU-U.S. Privacy Shield and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield programs.

Expedient’s Jonathan Rosenson

Jonathan Rosenson is senior vice president and COO of Expedient. He is responsible for the team that maintains the operational functions considered strategic to the company’s business objectives. He’s been with the company for more than 17 years. During that time, it has experienced ownership changes and made the pivot to virtualization.

Channel Futures: What new opportunities and challenges came with the global COVID-19 pandemic?

Jonathan Rosenson: Moving to a mostly virtual work presence is both an opportunity and a challenge during the pandemic. Expedient has maintained consistent on-premises 24×7 staffing of our 11 data center locations.

A challenge in doing so was to limit client visits to only those that were essential. An an opportunity was to make the offer to provide remote assistance above and beyond our standard service levels in order to keep employees and clients alike as safe as possible.

We previously suggested that clients schedule their visits as a courtesy to inform our staff of their planned arrival. We began requiring it by mid-March 2020 in order to manage facility capacity and ensure proper social distancing in common areas. For the majority of our team that began working from home, we had already provided the flexibility to do so and we had the infrastructure in place to make the change immediately.

There was a variety of other opportunities and challenges. That included finding new ways to engage with clients and prospects virtually. We found a receptiveness to our team’s creative ideas to do so. Expedient found engagement with new prospects and existing clients alike and used the opportunity to stage solution demonstrations with question and answer sessions. We also made the recordings available for individuals whose schedules precluded their live attendance.

CF: What was the single biggest technology or business decision that drove your company’s growth in 2019? How did it do so?

JR: In December 2019, Expedient was purchased by AMP Capital, an infrastructure private equity firm with a history of investing in essential infrastructure. Prior to the acquisition, Expedient enjoyed a nearly 15-year association with Landmark Media Enterprises as its closely held owner and capital sponsor. AMP Capital has a long-term return approach to investment. They intend to support the Expedient business model for many years as the platform for its digital infrastructure-as-a-service investment.

Expedient has a track record of successfully introducing innovative solutions in conjunction with expansion into new markets. AMP Capital intends to support Expedient’s strategic initiatives. This will accelerate innovation and expansion into new markets and, under the right conditions, execution of complementary acquisitions. Expedient is well-positioned to be a leading enterprise cloud and managed service provider.

With AMP Capital’s support and access to diverse capital sources, Expedient will evolve its strategy, increase organizational capacity and expand more quickly. This will enable us to serve more – and larger – organizations in a nationwide footprint. Last year, Expedient expanded to the western United States. We established a cloud point of delivery in Phoenix. Now we offer clients a new option for production and disaster recovery operations in a geography not previously available for Expedient Enterprise Cloud.

CF: Tell us the story of the biggest pivot you’ve ever had to execute.

JR: Our biggest pivot was many years ago. We moved from selling and managing telecommunications services, physical hardware and perpetual software licenses to virtual machines and software subscriptions. It was such a different way of delivering services — and value – to clients.

Moving to virtualization enabled a different cost model. It also created some concerns. Some clients appreciated the shared (lower) cost of multitenancy but didn’t know what to expect in terms of performance and security. We cannibalized some of our revenue by migrating physical colocation clients to virtualization platforms. However, the operational and cost efficiency gains contributed to a faster-than-expected normalization back to growth.

A few years later, once the early adopters had largely been satisfied, the mindset of our sellers also had to change as a result of this pivot. Their processes had to switch from transactional to outcome-based messaging. As a result of this transition, we saw an opportunity to expand geographically and bring the consumption service experiences to organizations of a similar type and size as those that were initially attracted to it in the cities where the company first started.