The Doyle Report: MTM Is a Study in Digital Transformation

Editor’s Note: You can read more from MTM Technologies’ Bill Kleyman on our sister site, The WHIR, where he is a regular contributor. 

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What do you call a channel practitioner that has transformed from reselling to managed services to product development? A vendor, services provider or something else?

How about calling the company precisely what it is: MTM Technologies, Inc., a Stamford, Conn., solutions provider that has positioned itself at the forefront of digital transformation.

This month, MTM unveils its latest digital offering, “AnywhereApp,” a workspace-as-a-service platform that provides customers secure access to desktops, applications and data from any device, any location and any infrastructure, be they located on-premise servers or some combination of public, private or hybrid cloud. (Whew!)

Before I get to the guts of the AnywhereApp—and what makes the company so important—here’s some background on MTM.

MTM was founded in 1986. Its mission: help medium-to-enterprise-sized organizations onboard, leverage and manage Information and Communications Technology (ICT) that spans microcomputers to mainframes. (That’s where the name “MTM” comes from.)

Over time, the company developed into a reliable if not standout resale and integration partner for Cisco, Citrix, NetApp, VMware and Microsoft, just to name a few. For customers around the U.S., MTM provided comprehensive managed services around virtualization, mobility, data centers and more.

The rise of cloud computing, however, made the leaders at MTM rethink how they viewed the market and, moreover, how they viewed themselves. They saw a democratization and consumerization of technology that intrigued them. While they recognized exciting and innovative things all around them, they understood that that channel companies like them were not delivering these new and advanced digital solutions. They also thought that relying on others to develop the intellectual property (IP) that they delivered was turning them into commodity services brokers. For lack of a better words, MTM was staring into the abyss of becoming just another “so-what” ICT services provider, says Bill Kleyman, chief technology officer (CTO) at MTM Technologies.

“Because of that, we took a step back and did further analysis based on the feedback we received. We learned that customers don’t want to put both feet into the cloud. And they don’t want to keep everything on-premise as well. We learned that ‘custom’ wasn’t a bad word and that no one customer was alike. Everyone was using a ‘snowflake’ kind of architecture,” says Kleyman.

^{Bill Kleyman, MTM Technologies}

The introspection led to MTM to reimagine itself. Instead of going to market as a “professional services” provider, it re-branded itself as an “innovation services” company. Instead of “five-nines” uptime, which many customers couldn’t appreciate, it repositioned itself as a provider of “digital services” that could help companies with technology transformations of their own.

To that end, the company reoriented its deliverables around consumption models that provide a mechanism for customers to pay for only what they consume and a flexible mix of vendor products and services that spanned user devices, technology architectures and software applications.

This is where AnywhereApp comes in. AnywhereApp is a customizable cloud and on-premise solution that parcels out ICT services on a per-user, per-month subscription basis. This includes everything from mobility to the IoT and more.

To bring the service to market, the company had to work out the economics of multiple vendor programs, some of which were not devised to accommodate variable consumption models. In addition, MTM had to negotiate with key partners to gain permission to package services, product offerings and terms in a certain way. All told, the work constituted not just astute negotiating, but actual IP creation.

“Every business is going to define a digital strategy differently,” says Kleyman. For example, he points to one of its customers, a local healthcare provider. It cannot, by law, put everything into the public cloud. But it also cannot afford to ignore the advantages of new and more flexible cloud-based computing models. Rather than leave this customer stranded, MTM created a flexible framework and architecture that can now extend to any customer, industry, applications or device, no matter the customer’s legacy technology, regulatory oversight or business objective.

Whether you’re in telecom, healthcare, education or some other industry, MTM believes it can create a custom, flexible technology solution that can be delivered for a fraction of traditional technology solutions. This includes everything from lifecycle services to image management to managed services, data monitoring, proactive analytics and more.

“What we have done in this industry for the first time ever is create a very much unique contract with some of the very biggest organizations out there—Cisco, Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, etc.—where we can go to a customer and say, ‘one price, per user, per month, consumed, and you never, ever again overpay for what you are not using,’” says Kleyman.

So what does the arrival of AnywhereApp mean in terms of MTM’s business? Good question, says Kleyman. For starters, it dramatically increases the size of the company’s Total Addressable Market (TAM). It also redefines the company’s market distinction.

“We had to create our own paradigm shift,” says Kleyman. “For somebody that has been around since 1986, we had to reshape our own mentality around delivering technology… [In some ways,] we have become more of a vendor. And we will sell into different marketplaces, like Ingram Micro, for example.”

“We don’t want to part ways with what we are really good at; we need to evolve it and take it to the next level,” he says.

Are you ready to do the same? Let me know.