Trianz Named MSP 501 Digital Innovator of the Year

When Sri Manchala launched his MSP practice, Trianz, 17 years ago with just $1,000, he drew on his background serving in India’s armed forces to shape his approach toward successful execution in the world of IT service delivery. Among the lessons Manchala brought from his military service: Delivering winning outcomes for clients on the first attempt was essential.

“There are no runners-up in war and you can’t fight the same battle twice,” Manchala said. “You can’t go back to the enemy and say, ‘Hey, I learned a lot of lessons the last time I lost. Let’s fight again, right.’”

Manchala learned the ropes of IT consulting during stints at KPMG and Cisco in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He says both experiences set the stage for him to launch Trianz in 2001, with a goal of filling a void in the IT consulting space.

“I determined that we’re going to start with the business point of view first, and then transition into how technology and IT can deliver these capabilities,” he said.

Sri Manchala

Sri Manchala

Based in Santa Clara, California, Trianz has evolved from a boutique IT consulting firm providing basic managed services to a 1,600-employee MSP that leverages its own extensive IP and expertise to further clients’ vision for their businesses. Its innovation and forward-thinking development projects earned Trianz the 2018 MSP 501 Digital Innovator of the Year Award.

Lately, Trianz’s clients have been asking about next-gen business applications with automation capabilities that bolster staff and produce more predictable, lower-touch results. As applications become more advanced, Manchala expects to be pulled more and more into business conversations.

Trianz’s MSP business is focused on hybrid-cloud-based IT service delivery in four core areas: analytics, digital, infrastructure modernization and security, and Manchala touts its “Innovation Labs” as testing facilities to evaluate new platforms for specific use cases.

But Trianz’s real differentiator is the low-cost intellectual property it’s developed to support and accelerate each of its four core service areas. For example, its DataVision+ testing tool for data migration projects is designed to compare source and destination data, and Trianz says it’s removed 40 percent of the effort associated with data migration.

Trianz also offers an aggregator platform that it says provides a complete view of a client’s distributed infrastructure. As Trianz maps out potential projects for clients, it offers its TCO Calculator, which can help model architecture and design, predict cost and help determine migration options based on different technology stacks.

To support its data-analytics practice, the MSP developed the Trianz Marketing Data Lake Solution to provide an omnichannel view of a client’s customer base. Just like uptime and patching are table stakes today, so is analytics-as-a-service, which Manchala says makes Trianz focused on less technical, more insight- and action-oriented offerings.

The same is the case for cloud infrastructure management, where Trianz has its own managed services platform, Concierto, for deploying, orchestrating, monitoring and managing multicloud services.

“The client isn’t even buying software anymore,” Manchala said. “Either we buy the software, or we give them a platform and we manage it on that.”

The concept of “digital transformation” has become so all-encompassing that it’s almost impossible to pare down into something digestible and manageable, but through its IP development and process innovation, Trianz thinks it’s making real headway, and its evolution is by no means done. The company will soon unveil an entirely new business initiative designed to further its insights into organizational digital transformation initiatives.

As Manchala learned all those years ago, no battle can be fought twice, so Trianz brings every bit of expertise and innovative IP it has to bear for clients.  The company’s slogan and the promise it makes to customers is “Digital Evolution Simplified” — and it’s a promise Manchala is determined to keep.