MSP 501 Profile: Ashton Technology Solutions Meets Customers' Needs with Own Managed Services Toolset

Company Name: Ashton Technology Solutions
Company MSP 501 Rank: 109
Executive Vice President of Operations: Travis Grundke
Headquartered: Beachwood, Ohio

Primary services:

Twitter: @AshtonSolutions

Ashton Technology Solutions has moved away from traditional managed services players like ConnectWise and Kaseya, and developed its own toolset to meet its customers’ needs.

The MSP offers managed and co-managed IT services, data security, IT project management, strategic consulting and other technology services. It serves small and midsized businesses in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio.

Among the industries it serves are architecture, construction and engineering, manufacturing and industrial, schools and non-profits, and more.

Ashton Technology Solutions’ Travis Grundke

Travis Grundke, Ashton Technology Solutions’ executive vice president of operations, talks about opportunities prompted by the COVID-10 pandemic and more.

Pandemic Presented Opportunities, Not Challenges

Channel Futures: What new opportunities and challenges came with the global COVID-19 pandemic?

Travis Grundke: Organizations became more comfortable with remote work – including remote support. This has been an opportunity for us, and not a challenge because our client base leverages a standardized security suite, which made the move to remote support easy for our engineers.

CF: What was the single biggest technology or business decision that drove your company’s growth in 2020? And in the first half of 2021? How did it do so?

TG: Beginning to move away from the traditional players (ConnectWise, Kaseya, etc.). We began developing our own toolset that is catered to our unique way of delivering service, and this has only reinforced our unique position in the industry.

CF: What is one thing you wish vendors would do that they don’t?

TG: Understand that they are not serving the industry by putting their tools into the hands of inexperienced, untrained, unserious IT firms. The MSP industry is quickly filling with service providers who are ill equipped to keep their clients secure, and who are instead focusing on selling the most profitable vendor solution to them.

CF: What do you love about the IT channel? What do you hate about it?

TG: The IT channel is full of “all show, no go” vendors. It’s a challenge to educate prospects on the dangers of low-cost solutions that are not properly thought through. The channel has resulted in IT providers becoming purely sales driven, with a shocking lack of depth and expertise that modern IT requires.