Blue Mantis has pivoted to managed services over several years while maintaining its healthy resale business.
Some 60% of the New England-based firm’s revenue is now recurring, a sign that the company is driving increased business through contracted managed services. Still, its legacy value-added reseller practice continues to grow, COO Jay Pasteris told Channel Dive.
“Without sacrificing procurement, we have outpaced it with recurring MSP services,” Pasteris said.
The company spent eight years transforming from GreenPages — a data center hardware and VMware reseller — into a hybrid business model, rebranding as Blue Mantis in 2023 to reflect the shift.
“We looked at this years ago and said, 'Okay, as this technology world is evolving. As our customers are expecting more from a provider. They're expecting more than just… buying hardware or software,’” he said.
Recently recognized in the MSP 501 rankings, the firm continues to expand its capabilities as a managed services provider. The company enhanced its ServiceNow practice with the acquisition of Coreio, purchased multiple MSPs, added its own offshore support team, and introduced fully managed security services.
Now the company looks to automate basic IT help desk functions to grow the practice.
“As we take on more customers, take on more devices, we don't have to scale linearly with human labor anymore,” Pasteris said. “We can use AI to drive those efficiencies by automating the beginning of that task. Taking the ticket in, routing the ticket, resolving first-level incidents, password resets, things like that.”
The idea is that if Blue Mantis employees have a “digital twin” that performs the most rote tasks, they can play a more strategic role with customers.
“You can focus on that client experience. You can focus on elevating that conversation with them,” he said.
Blue Mantis offers a wide variety of support models for managed services, but it historically outsourced support overseas. The firm, at its clients’ request, incorporated in India and established an office in Bangalore three years ago. The global delivery center now has 250 people and is growing.
“We can fully offshore if a customer wants that, and give them that great price point, or we have a follow-the-sun model for customers that need that 24/7 care,” Pasteris said.
Cloud licensing and FinOps
The channel partner is also enjoying a growing FinOps business,that is fueling growth in resale and managed services.
The FinOps practice launched in 2023 as part of the company’s cloud service provider business. The company resells licenses from the likes of Microsoft, AWS and Adobe and analyzes customer licensing spend to help them save money.
“It's quietly one of the most monetizable trends in the channel or for organizations. It's one of those places where we can work to drive down costs for our customers, gain more efficiencies, but also wrap a service around that,” he said.
Perhaps most importantly, customers can save 20-30% and spend those savings on other parts of the IT stack.
“Now I can look at the things I need to do — [including] AI and security — and reinvest in those areas and drive outcomes in their organizations,” Pasteris said.
