The Roadmap to Success: BitTitan Empowers Service Providers to Drive Cloud Adoption Through MigrationWiz, MSPComplete

With the industry’s best migration tool and a powerful IT services automation platform, BitTitan helps organize, optimize, and automate service delivery.

IT-as-a-Service enables companies to enter new markets, get closer to customers, and make increasingly mobile employees more productive. After your private cloud is established, effective management of infrastructure performance, compliance, and efficiency are one part of the equation. The ability to quickly roll out new applications and services to the right users at the right time is another; but these processes are often manual, time-consuming, expensive, and difficult to control.

In light of the above-mentioned concern, we are thrilled to present BitTitan, a global Managed Services Automation company helping technology professionals assess, deploy, and manage solutions in a cloud-first world.

The company was established in 2007 and is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington.

Interview Excerpt: Geeman Yip, Founder/CEO

Getting off the Ground: The Birth of the Idea

In 2007, the cloud was poised to explode. Its convenience, flexibility, and scalability simply held too much potential to be another passing fad. That said, most businesses didn’t have the expertise to get their data into the cloud. Email was the “gateway drug” – by automating the mailbox migration process through a solution called MigrationWiz, IT professionals and service providers were able to quickly and smoothly begin moving email to the cloud. BitTitan soon added other workload capabilities such as documents, public folders, and archives to MigrationWiz, available today through a single User Migration Bundle license.

As the cloud became more commoditized and the service provider landscape grew, new trends arose. These included a shift towards recurring revenue through ongoing managed services as well as the dawn of automation. In 2015, BitTitan launched MSPComplete, an IT services automation platform to help businesses organize, optimize, and automate their IT services delivery. “By centralizing standard operating procedures, improving visibility into project status and performance, and automating key workflows, providers can deliver frictionless IT services that are repeatable, scalable, and profitable.”

Taking the Bull by the Horns

BitTitan’s founding story can be an inspirational lesson to any entrepreneur setting out to create something new. Geeman’s drive faced its greatest test in the early days of MigrationWiz. He funded the company entirely on his own, liquidated his savings from his eight years at Microsoft, maxed out multiple credit cards, and took a second mortgage, all during the economic downturn of 2008. Despite having to “engineer the financial situation,” Geeman remained focused on deriving simple technology solutions to more complex IT problems – a persistence that paid off. In many respects, MigrationWiz was an overnight success once the first iteration of the tool debuted. Rather than seek outside capital once this product was in the market, Geeman would bootstrap the company for another seven years until a 2016 $15M Series A round gave BitTitan extra resources to expand its global footprint, open an office in Singapore, and help launch MSPComplete.

The Innovation Catalysts

Customer Voice as a Value: “Paying attention towards the voice of the customer is one of our four company values.” Direct feedback from customers is the best way to ensure – BitTitan’s solutions are delivering value to its users and driving its business forward. Support, sales, and customer success teams are on the front lines in this regard, talking to customers and MSP thought leaders to ensure its current offerings and product roadmap aligns with the true needs of these businesses.

Born in the Cloud: BitTitan never “moved” to the cloud. Instead, the company matured alongside the cloud, working through the same barriers and enjoying the same successes.

Market Vision: Seeing trends in the market before the competition – and possibly even before the service providers themselves – has helped BitTitan maintain its edge in the market. MigrationWiz and MSPComplete were both products ahead of their respective times, helping businesses overcome technical and business barriers while “opening the door to new services that they could benefit and profit from.”

Data-driven: Decisions big or small need to be rooted in fact. That’s only possible through data. Be it choices about platform features, internal programs, or long-term business decisions, BitTitan and its leadership turn to the numbers to see what the right next move will be.

Culture is Key: When Geeman left Microsoft, he strove to create another environment just like the dot.com days: where smart, passionate, driven people were empowered to work hard, get stuff done, and have fun along the way. Both offices in Bellevue and Singapore enjoy this type of culture that breeds transparency, inclusion, and the pursuit of the best possible solution to complex IT problems.

Going the Extra Mile

“Customer trust and loyalty for us begins before they even purchase a solution.” For service providers approaching BitTitan with a migration project, oftentimes the technical solution through MigrationWiz comes second. “What they are really looking for is someone to help them plan and execute the move – we are that partner.”

BitTitan support teams go to great lengths to help service providers navigate these complexities, troubleshoot errors, and ultimately help transition these organizations over to the cloud. In addition, delivering consistent outcomes and being a thought leader in this space translates to a positive market reputation.

In Full Swing

IT service providers are facing a major shift in the industry away from break/fix project work that has paid the bills for years. Today’s service provider needs to move towards an ongoing managed services model that generates a stable flow of recurring revenue and brings the provider closer to their customer. Those stuck on a project-by-project basis will struggle to exist past 2018.

BitTitan’s solutions enable service providers to assess, deploy, and manage technology solutions in

this manner. These providers have intellectual property strewn throughout their organization, both on paper and in the minds of their employees. This IP is crucial to providers establishing recurring services and distancing themselves from other offerings in the market, in addition to strengthening their business relationships with the end users. Automation is one way that these providers can capture that IP and deliver it through services that meet the needs of these users.

Keeping Eye on the Ball

BitTitan is focused on expanding its library of runbooks within MSPComplete “to empower more providers to deploy an even greater range of services for their customers.”

Game Plan

BitTitan has strong relationships within the Microsoft ecosystem, and over the coming months, those relationships will continue to stretch towards other cloud providers such as Amazon and Google. The runbook library and automation capabilities are priorities over that time frame as well, enabling service providers to package their intellectual property and deliver out-of-the-box solutions to their end users.

The Man Behind The Operation

Geeman Yip: Geeman has over twenty years of experience in the software and IT industries, including email services, identity management, telephony systems, and business productivity applications. Prior to BitTitan, Geeman was a program manager and early member of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite team – the foundation for today’s Office 365 suite. Mr Yip is an active mentor and philanthropist in the Greater Seattle Area and holds an Information and Computer Science degree from the University of California, Irvine.

“Our solutions are here to enable IT professionals and service providers to build and grow their businesses in the cloud. It’s a multi-cloud world, and ultimately we strive to be its IT gateway.”