Success Story: 10th Magnitude Builds a Managed Services Business From the Ground Up

Companies from around the world rely on 10th Magnitude for innovative Cloud solutions and Managed Services. In turn, 10th Magnitude relies on Provance IT Service Management® and Microsoft Dynamics® 365 for IT service delivery excellence.

“We needed a big-time tool to be the cornerstone of our Managed Services offering, but we also needed a partner that understood our business. Provance ITSM provides everything our Fortune 100 clients need and they understand where we are going as a Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP). Not only are they providing the back-end for our managed offerings, they are innovating with us to make sure we continue to be a trusted leader in the Managed Services space.”  – Alex Brown, CEO at 10th Magnitude

Building a Strong Foundation

Named Microsoft Partner of the Year for three years in a row, 10th Magnitude has had a long-standing relationship with Microsoft that stretches back to 2010 when Microsoft first launched Azure. 10th Magnitude has been living and thriving in the Cloud ever since, first with professional services helping clients migrate to the Cloud with Microsoft Azure, and now with their Managed Services offering.

“As a Microsoft Azure Expert MSP Partner, we are 100% focused on Microsoft Azure, but we also run our entire operations off of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform,” said Ryan McDonald, SVP, Managed Services at 10th Magnitude. “When we decided to start our Managed Services division in 2017, we evaluated various ITSM solutions strengths and weaknesses, but when we discovered Provance we saw the synergies right away—the fact that Provance ITSM runs natively on the Dynamics 365 platform and had built-in integrations to Azure Monitor and Azure Automation meant that we could have a single source of truth for ourselves and all our clients.”

How Provance ITSM Measures Up

When 10th Magnitude decided to branch out into Managed Services they knew they needed an ITSM solution that would provide them with the structure to get up and managing clients quickly. They were already providing professional services to a broad range of companies worldwide, a lot of whom would be immediately interested in their Managed Services offering.

“Many of the ITSM solutions we looked at had time-consuming implementation processes requiring quite a bit of custom configuration, which would involve coding or other specialized skillsets,” said McDonald. “Since Provance ITSM has the same capabilities as Dynamics 365, you don’t need to be a developer or a hard-nosed coder to configure it. Dynamics 365 is fairly easy to master and so we knew Provance ITSM would be too.”

As 10th Magnitude got deeper into their evaluation of ITSM solutions, they also realized how important ITIL® would be for the effective functioning of their new Managed Services division. “ITIL is usually a big part of how our Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 clients operate, and since Provance ITSM allowed for code-free configuration while also being PinkVerified for 11 ITIL practices, we could rely on Provance ITSM to provide us with industry best practices and a standard operating base, which we could then cost-effectively configure depending on how each of our clients operate and their unique requirements.”

From purchase of Provance ITSM to onboarding their first client, the new 10th Magnitude Managed Services division was in action in less than a couple of months.

“The speed in which we were able to get Provance ITSM installed and configured was hugely beneficial to us,” said McDonald. “Other ITSM solutions, for example, needed additional configuration and functionality for clients to log into a self-service portal and see only their tickets, whereas Dynamics 365 is a multi-tenant, multi-customer type solution by nature, therefore Provance ITSM just worked that way right out-of-the-box.”

Right from the start 10th Magnitude configured the Provance ITSM self-service portal so each client sees only their own tickets, while all the tickets, services, and knowledgebase are managed by the Service Desk in the back end with a single pane-of-glass view.

“We did have one of our clients request that they have their own company branded portal and with very little effort we were able to provide that to them, without causing double duty for our own Service Desk, as all tickets flow into Dynamics 365” said Jennifer Grassan, Dynamics Platform Architect Management and Delivery at 10th Magnitude.

The self-service portal, service catalog and ticket templates were key capabilities that drew 10th Magnitude to choose Provance ITSM. All three capabilities work together to reduce workloads, provide client self-sufficiency, and ensure consistency and quality.

“I just love what we can do with the self-service portal, ticketing, and automations,” said Grassan. “Our clients use the self-service portal not only to log tickets, but to also deploy infrastructure through services that we’ve published for them. For example, we’ve been able to allow the automatic creation of virtual machines. This is major. Using automations, our clients can start and stop virtual machines just by logging a ticket. We don’t have to touch the ticket at all. We also set up another automation that performs a double check, ensuring that if there is a problem, we’re there to resolve.”

“We also have a number of clients who are using other ITSM solutions, but we’ve been able to create a two-way integration between Provance ITSM and these other solutions. So, data filters from all these different systems, but we still get to work from a single, pane-of-glass,” said McDonald.

10th Magnitude also benefits greatly from the Provance ITSM built-in integration with Azure because the Azure Monitor ITSM connector provides automated, real-time and bi-directional integration, turning alerts into Provance ITSM tickets, while also allowing for the trigger of automated workflows. “It allows us to handle lifecycle and infrastructure operations, such as letting business users manage infrastructure through a self-service portal,” said McDonald. “The built-in integration to Azure has impacted how we effectively manage services, but also on what services we can offer our clients, which benefits us and them.”

Growth is on the Horizon

Since beginning their Managed Services division, 10th Magnitude has experienced tremendous growth in clients. They credit Provance ITSM as providing the support they needed to expand quickly as well as the Provance engineering team. “Over the last few years, we’ve worked with the Provance team to build out capabilities that we realized we needed as we’ve grown,” said Grassan. “But one of the things that the Provance team also does really well is that they continually grow with Microsoft. They continue to improve functionality and processes, and they continue to put out new releases just as fast as, if not faster, than Microsoft. It’s something that we all, especially the operations engineers, really appreciate.”