Ultima boss: Pandemic has made automation a 'hotter topic'
Scott Dodds opens up on latest automation offering and how building a platform for other MSPs plays into company's growth strategy
The pandemic has accelerated customer interest in deploying autonomous services, according to Ultima boss Scott Dodds.
The robotic process automation (RPA) specialist has recently launched its Autonomous Workspace service, which manages the user's devices, operating system, communications platform, documents and all connections.
Though the latest offering had been part of the company's roadmap pre-COVID, the massive shift to remote working spurred on its development as customers sought to manage their work environments autonomously.
"The last six months have been chaos with everybody going remote, so [Autonomous Workspace] plays to what everyone's been doing: managing devices and workspaces where you're remote, you're managing things like the operating systems and the application layers all the way through," Dodds told CRN.
"The autonomous strategy was always part of our roadmap, but the uptake has been accelerated by our customers."
The latest offering was piloted internally at Ultima as the company found itself having to undergo the sudden, government-mandated pivot to remote working in March.
"We've been able to roll out our Autonomous Workspace strategy to our own devices and it's been a dramatic improvement," he stated.
"Everything is done remotely now; even to the extent where we're doing complete operating system rebuilds or updates and new platforms rolled out all through home broadband.
"We have tested and tried all those different environments and all the different technologies on ourselves - which is what always do in these areas - and now we're taking it to customers to show them the benefits. it's been quite a learning exercise for us."
The new offering combines many of Ultima's other offerings, including RPA and core Microsoft and Citrix technologies so that Ultima is doing all the background work that appears seamless to the user.
"It's a managed service; we build the environment, we remediate the environments that need it, operating systems and the application areas so that they work comfortably in a more modern, streamlined and secure environment," he elaborated.
"It stands on its own, but behind the scenes, it does use some of our automation technology to allow us to manage these environments and devices, manage and monitor alerts. There's a whole raft of different technologies that we pulled together to make all this work, but the user doesn't see any of that."
Customer feedback and surveys have shown positive interest in the technology, as organisations now set out their new long-term working environments, he added.
"There's an awful lot of people wanting to know a lot more about how this works, what the benefits are and how they can essentially release the time that they're spending on managing core infrastructure to do whatever innovation they need to do in their own business," he explained.
"Automation generally is a much hotter topic now; these things aren't instantaneous - it's a big deal to move your workspace environment into a new platform. But there's an awful lot of companies now working on how to do this in the most efficient way."
Ultima's Labs division is currently working on a similar platform that will allow other MSPs to build their own services around, the chief exec said.
"We've been building these services to automate our own engagements with our customers in a managed service environment and we've built out platforms that we can work with other partners on," Dodds explained.
"We're going to have a platform version for MSPs that don't have the capability to build it or they haven't got it yet to be able to pick this up and run their own services for managing Azure or workspace and building their own managed services around it.
"Why reinvent the wheel if we've got a platform they can use? We're happy to have that as a partner strategy; there's a P2P strategy here for us that we're building out."