MSP of the Year: Calligo Hits Privacy Out of the Park

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a three-part series profiling the 2019 finalists for the MSP 501 MSP of the Year Award, which was presented on Sept. 10 at the MSP 501 awards dinner during Channel Partners Evolution. Read about finalists Vendasta here and ARG here.

Data privacy has taken center stage in the past few years, shaking up security protocols everywhere. The industry has notoriously dragged its feet in terms of adoption, and partners have been slow to pivot and implement necessary solutions.

Not so for U.K.-based provider Calligo. The company has hit the data privacy ball out of the park, spinning up a sophisticated, complex and solid solution and business unit around these services, that earned it this year’s MSP of the Year award.

The purpose of the MSP of the Year award is to specifically recognize business agility, and the ability to take risks, respond to market conditions and bounce back from mistakes. It is here that Calligo shines as a business model.

Calligo has built data protection into every aspect of its operations. This approach has allowed them to create something that’s been incredibly successful, skyrocketing from zero into a multimillion revenue stream in just over a year.

Calligo’s Julian Box

“We’d been using this sort of mantra, asking, ‘How do we make something a service? How do we simplify it? How do we make it into something that is easily consumed, easily understood, easily accounted for from a cost perspective?'” said Julian Box, founder and CEO of Calligo. “So when you look at someone’s data journey, we focus on three clear areas: how was the data captured, how was the data processed and what’s next. The set of services that we’re bringing to market now are all around the insight and automation and creating intelligent workflows.”

The idea is working with clients to create and understand these intelligent workflows, and then delivering that as a service. This takes away the need to hire costly personnel with niche skill sets within organizations to leverage the next generations of technology (which is largely centered around automation and insight). Instead, Calligo is working on turning that into a service.

“Of course, the margins on this kind of service are a bit higher than they are on the more traditional managed services, but they genuinely do provide far more value to the client as well,” said Box. “And that differentiates us. That’s why we see ourselves as a data optimization company rather than a hosted company or traditional MSP. We do a lot of that stuff, but it is part of a holistic overall solution — helping our clients capture that data.”

As we move further into the IOT era, data generation is becoming more of a consideration. About every 18 months we create more data than existed in the previous 18 months. (Imagine a tap that’s been left on, except it’s data pouring out instead of water). So the challenge, then, is how to deal with all that data. Gone are…

…the days when data could just simply be stored. With privacy and the ethical side of things coming into play, people now must be able to understand and collect the right type of data.

“That’s where this whole next generation of services is pivoting toward,” said Box. “Now, it’s all about helping our clients collect the right type of data. Once they have the right type of data and they know it’s being collected ethically and legally, they can really then start to monetize it. Further, we as an MSP can monetize it because we can turn it into recurring managed service revenue for ourselves.”