MSP 501 Digital Innovator of the Year: Logically

Organizations that don’t have large IT department face massive hurdles when it comes to dealing with… well, IT. The reality is, IT can be quite complex and hard to manage, making it difficult for small and midsize organizations to achieve the benefits of digital transformation.

Logically’s Jeff Loeb

SMB managed IT services provider Logically came up with an innovative and transformative solution that addresses this issue, earning the company the title of this year’s Digital Innovator of the Year. This title is awarded to the company that demonstrates excellence in intellectual property development in a company’s home-grown product or service.

Jeff Loeb, chief marketing officer at Logically, discusses the business need that prompted the game-changing technology, OpLogic, and how it has impacted digital transformation.

Channel Futures: How does Logically define such an ambiguous term as “digital transformation”? 

Jeff Loeb: Today’s digital technology enables small and midsize organizations to “punch above their weight” and leverage high-impact technologies previously only accessible to large organizations with big teams and budgets. Digital transformation is the process that organizations go through to transform their core business processes using modern cloud-based technologies to increase competitiveness, create new revenue opportunities, lower costs and improve the customer experience.

CF: In your application, you focused on your OpLogic solution. Briefly describe what it is and what it does.

JL: OpLogic is a self-healing intelligent MSP platform for small and midsize businesses that stops problems before they stop you. OpLogic is a cloud-based automation tool that allows your IT environment to self-heal, increasing uptime and reducing security risks. OpLogic integrates, automates and orchestrates IT managed services provisioning and management. Available exclusively from Logically, OpLogic serves as mission control for all our managed IT customers and ensures the most reliable, effective and personalized service delivery in the industry.

CF: What was the business need that prompted its development?

JL: The development of OpLogic was driven by the reality that Information Technology is extremely complex and is increasingly difficult to manage, especially for organizations that don’t have large IT departments. Virtualization, SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, cybersecurity, business continuity, regulatory compliance and remote workers are just some of the technology trends and challenges driving complexity. For small and midsize organizations to achieve the benefits of digital transformation, the management of IT had to be simplified and automated.  A recent Logically industry survey revealed that 93% of SMBs consider IT to be business critical. This drives the need for high uptime, rapid problem resolution and continuous system hygiene. Additionally, managed IT service providers need automation in order to scale effectively and be able to provide personalized and customized service to their customers. OpLogic addresses all of these challenges by automating daily audits of all systems and devices, ensuring data is protected and all backups are completed successfully, making sure that all services are delivered every day as contracted, with thousands of incidents self-healed every month.

From an MSP operational perspective, the development of OpLogic was driven by the lack of capabilities in the market with existing solutions to integrate front and back office management solutions. Existing MSP…

… platforms didn’t address the fundamental question, “Are we successfully delivering the services to customers as contracted?” A key trigger that led to the development of OpLogic was discovering that an engineer had inadvertently turned off patch management for a customer within the RMM and it wasn’t discovered for months. That led us to realize there had to be a better way, and thus, OpLogic was born!

CF: What were the market conditions OpLogic’s development reflected?

JL: Game-changing technology is now available to enable small and midsize organizations to compete more effectively than ever if complexity of IT management can be reduced. A recent Logically industry study found that 59% of SMBs are finding it difficult to hire, retain and recruit IT personnel. Industry dynamics favor MSPs that automate key service delivery functions in order to improve efficiency and scalability. Lastly, a comprehensive platform combining front office and back office real-time integration and delivery for managed service providers did not exist until OpLogic. As a result, the combined market conditions of increased IT management complexity, shortages of IT workers with the right skills, the need to be efficient and scalable, as well as the lack of capabilities available to MSPs formed the market conditions that lead to the development of OpLogic.

CF: Why did you decide to develop in-house rather than build atop a vendor or other existing solution?

JL: OpLogic evolved over many years based on the intimate knowledge of a core team of technologists and application developers that deeply understood the needs of customers and the strengths and limitations of the core technology platforms used by MSPs.

CF: What mistakes did you make in the development of the project? 

JL: One of the mistakes we made was trying to do too much and thinking too big. Initially, we didn’t take the approach of rolling out a “minimally viable product.” We learned early on the path to success was focusing on reducing major risk areas for our customers and closing functional gaps that existed in the third-party IT management tools we use to perform our services. Another critical mistake we made very early on was trying to do too much all at once and not prioritizing the project workload and feature requests within OpLogic. A shift in our ideology and approach allowed us to make a lot more progress, in a stable and meaningful way.

CF: How has the sale of OpLogic contributed to your company’s overall financial success?

JL: OpLogic plays a central role in Logically’s financial performance. It contributes to our success in many ways including: 1) service delivery automation enables us to scale cost effectively, 2) transparency and consistency of service delivery enables us to retain customers and reduce churn and 3) the ability to automate the customization of services allows us to tailor the offering to the exact needs of our customers and deliver them cost-effectively at scale.

CF: Does Logically have its own channel with OpLogic? I.e., is it available for other MSPs to license?

JL: Currently, OpLogic is available exclusively to Logically’s customers.