'We think it's going to be pretty market leading' - Digital Space CEO on why its cloud management portal is the future of managed services

MSP to launch multi-cloud and connectivity portal to enable customers to provision, and bill for their own services

Providing "self-service" customer billing could be the future of managed services, according to Digital Space's CEO Neil Muller.

The MSP boss told CRN that Digital Space is planning to launch its own cloud management portal which will allow customers to purchase and bill for their cloud and connectivity services autonomously.

The offering will form the "Customer Space" pillar of Digital Space's portfolio and will be launched in two phases. The first phase will go live in the first half of this year and will see Digital Space provision, report and bill network connectivity and multi-cloud capacity (including AWS, Azure, IBM and VDC platforms) on a single portal.

Phase two will come at the end of the year or early 2023 and will provide its customers with a fully authenticated self-service usage of its Customer Management Portal.

Muller said the new Customer Space phase 1 offering will launch soon and believes it will be "market leading" in the" secure connected cloud" managed services space.

"In our chosen market, it's exactly what our customer base is after," he said.

"We want to put power into our customers' hands so they're able to effectively manage all of their estate from a single pane of glass," he said.

"The obvious question people ask is, how are you going to bill for that? Well, the value add for the customer is exponential and the value add for us is lock in. It's longer-term and they will become dependent on our portal, and therefore our services become a lot more irreplaceable."

The Fortinet, TalkTalk, BT Wholesale, 8x8 and AWS partner has undergone a drastic transformation over the last three years.

Formerly called Timico, the business used to predominantly resell broadband tariffs, fibre ethernet and MPLS services from the likes of BT, TalkTalk and Vodafone to around 6,500 SMB customers.

"It's a decent business, but such underlay products are a race to the bottom," said Muller.

But, after acquiring IT infrastructure and hosting services firm Atos IT Outsourcing Services in mid-2019, Timico gained access to a large corporate customer base with hosting managed services. A second acquisition in late 2020 of Arcus Cloud Services meanwhile brought in Public Sector customers and strategic AWS competencies focused on cloud desktop and server migration as well as Amazon Connect Contact Centre and DevOps expertise.

Following a three-year transformation and its rebrand to Digital Space, the MSP is now deriving over 90 per cent of its revenues from corporate private and public sector customers with between 500 to 5,000 users, Muller claims.

The MSP derives around 45 per cent of its annual revenues from its so-called Connected Space business which includes sales of SD-WAN, LAN and managed WiFi. Another 45 per cent comes from its Productive Space arm which consists of private, public and hybrid cloud as well as unified comms solutions. The remaining 10 per cent stems from cyber security services sales.

Muller said he has been working on growing Digital Space's cyber security arm over the last 12 months, with a focus on adding a security operations centre (SOC) capability to the business.

The CEO said it would've taken too long to build its own SOC from the ground up and ruled out making an acquisition after a six-month search yielded no promising results.

"Customers really want us to be delivering that one hand to shake and they don't have the time to wait for us to build this capability,"

"I started looking at a lot of acquisition opportunities in the marketplace - particularly throughout 2021. And it took about six months to work out that the organisations that we were looking at were either not what they said they were, or they were, in my opinion, overpriced.

"Some of them might have been security resellers that maybe had a little bit of services wrap but were actually positioning themselves as a managed security services business."

Muller said he then looked into joining up with a third-party provider which led to the MSP sealing a partnership with CyberQ.

The partnership provides Digital Space with its white labelled CyberQ global SOC capability, providing its customers with fully compliant CREST and ISO 27000 managed security services.

"That's the only area of the business where we partner - everything else we do ourselves. Effectively the customer has that one hand to shake with Digital Space being that secure, connected cloud managed service provider, but the security aspects of that we deliver through a partner which is CyberQ," said Muller.

Digital Space sells directly to customers in verticals including public sector, construction and manufacturing, retail, hospitality and leisure as well as financial and professional services.

The MSP, however, does also serve the SMB market through its indirect SMB Wholesale business - whilst deeming SMB direct customers as non-core.

It also takes an indirect route to market when working with central government and enterprise-level customers, Muller said, providing its own services to global systems integrators such as Atos.

"A lot of systems integrators come to us for SD-WAN, UC&C and Contact Centre services. The lines between workplace, datacentre and network have been blurring for some time, but they're blurring more than ever now, so our skills allow system integrator partners to complement their core application and infrastructure services capability.

"For example, sometimes a systems integrator is brilliant at application, datacentre, hosting and workplace services, but have a gap in datacentre connectivity."

Digital Space recently achieved Expert MSSP partner status with Fortinet, making the MSP one of only a handful in the UK to gain that certification.

The firm also recently earned Elite status with BT Wholesale, which opens the door to new benefits including access to its early access programme as well as new executive sponsorship, resources and tools.

Muller said that he believes Fortinet is leading the way in the SD-WAN space.

"Around 80 per cent of our Top 100 customers are looking at Fortinet because it is leading in terms of its secure by design capability, along with our Network Managed Service capability through our leading Network Operations Centre." he said.

Meanwhile the goal now is to sell more of Digital Space's wider portfolio, to its top customers, Muller said.

"There is an enormous amount of white space where people are either buying connected solutions, productivity solutions, or security solutions, so there's a big cross sell opportunity for us. But despite that, the key thing is really about adding long-term value to our customers by making sure our solutions are highly relevant in this ever-increasing world of digital transformation and management."