MSP 501 Profile: Otava's Significant Growth Boosts Global Play

Company Name: Otava

Company MSP 501 Rank: 66

CEO: Brad Cheedle

Headquarters: Ann Arbor, MI

Primary Services:

Twitter: @OtavaLLC

Otava has come a long way since its dial-up internet days. The hybrid cloud and IT solutions provider recently went international, expanding its product offerings and growing its global footprint significantly. Originally named Online Technologies, the company was acquired and rebranded as Otava last year to reflect said growth.

The acquisition catapulted the company into international territory, expanding the areas in which it plays and the services it offers.

Otava’s Brad Cheedle

“With each transition and acquisition, we’ve expanded further as a channel-centric cloud and IT service provider, building a broad portfolio of fully managed IT services,” says CEO Brad Cheedle.

Here, Cheedle talks about Otava’s transitions and growth, its recent acquisition and its impact, and how it all factors into helping clients rise above their current levels.

Channel Futures: Given the rapidly changing and evolving IT landscape, how do you see Otava transitioning and growing in the next 12-24 months? 

Brad Cheedle: Otava’s recent acquisition has taken Otava from serving a primarily domestic market to an international one, with cloud nodes across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. This not only transitioned Otava from a national to an international player, it also allowed the company to evolve from a direct service delivery model to one that now includes robust wholesale, white-label solution offerings, exponentially compounding Otava’s reach and revenue potential.

In addition to Otava’s emphasis on the direct and channel go-to-market approach, it is equally focused on delivering and managing the most robust hybrid and multicloud solutions in the marketplace.

CF: Given Otava’s recent acquisition, has the influx of private equity and increase in M&A activity impacted your business? How?

BC: Otava was founded 25 years ago as Online Technologies Corp. Originally the company was a dial-up internet company but quickly evolved into data center hosting and colocation services. From there we added disaster recovery as a service and HIPAA-compliant cloud services to become the first 100% HIPAA-compliant hosting provider in the U.S. Last year Schurz Communications became our new investment partner, and with their support, later that year we were able to acquire the global cloud infrastructure assets of Neverfail.

Following the recent significant growth in our global footprint, this year we’ve rebranded as Otava to better reflect our bold people, partnerships and purpose as an aggregator of cloud companies.

Today, as Otava actively aggregates and consolidates best-of-breed cloud companies, it continues to invest in its people, tools and process. Positioned for significant growth and market leadership in cloud services, Otava sees clear opportunities to help enterprises transform in the digital age.

CF: In a sea of companies offering managed services, especially considering the flurry of investment and M&A activity, how do you stand out from the crowd?

BC: Otava’s quality of service and dedication to our customers’ success are differentiators that our customers place great value on. We generate exceptional results because we really get to know our clients and work with them toward their goals. We like to say that exceptional experiences are the rule, not the exception at Otava; in fact, it is our mission to help our clients rise above their current levels by optimizing their cloud environments through a combination of excellence in service delivery, performance and customer experience.