Blue Mantis CEO On Giving The ‘Enterprise Experience’ To The Midmarket

The midmarket is ‘underserved,’ says Blue Mantis CEO Josh Dinneen. Here’s what the solution provider is doing to rectify that.

MES Computing caught up with Blue Mantis CEO Josh Dinneen at Blue Mantis’ recent Cloudscape event in Newport, R.I.

The IT services company has been making big moves, including making acquisitions, helping its customers with digital transformation and helping them navigate cloud computing and AI.

Dinneen weighed in on the biggest challenges the company addresses for its midmarket customers, how it aids customers suffering from ransomware incidents and more in this one-on-one interview.

What are the biggest challenges you’re seeing from your midmarket customers?

I believe that the midmarket is underserved. There are a lot of players in the midmarket, but there are not a lot of players that can do comprehensive technology and support for their customers. A lot of the bigger firms focus on the large enterprise space.

We’re very intentional in going after the midmarket—it’s a big span of marketing segment for us.

The midmarket for us is where we can really leverage our entire product portfolio ... whether we’re coming in to help them modernize in any capacity, whether it’s to a specific domain or more of a comprehensive business transformation, we can help them better.

What are your midmarket customers largely focused on?

[There’s a] huge demand for modernizing networks, which is the underpinnings to do a lot of the things that we want to do around cybersecurity.

We’re seeing a lot of people doing big data projects.

Data projects [are] the underpinnings of AI [and are] very much dependent on how the network is set up. And how we can do it securely because the challenge with AI is if you can crack AI from a cyber perspective, you have the keys to the kingdom. So really making sure that you’re designing security into those environments intentionally. And then manage your data, enable your data ... make it usable for AI.

AI is very use-case-driven, generative AI specifically. How do I leverage generative AI to manage my contracts? That’s a big use case right now. How do I do deliver SOWS [statements of work] through generative AI more effectively? Those are things that we’re doing and most companies are looking at ... how do we reduce risk .... from a cyber perspective? How do I correlate all the data that I have to say, ‘Hey, this is outside the norm, now I need to take action.’ This use-case-based generative AI is what we’re seeing the most today. Our relationship with Microsoft [gives us the ability] to deliver Copilot and we’re leaning heavily into that for our customers. We’re using it ourselves, but it starts with making sure you have a real handle on your data, your data policies. Regulation is a huge part of that. Getting organized is really the most important thing right now for customers.

MSPs and other companies offer so many converged services. What are the main services that Blue Mantis delivers to its customers?

It is crowded, people use the same nomenclature. You say ‘managed services’ to someone and it means 20 different things. Same with cloud services ... these big buzzwords become problematic because what we look to do is demystify stuff.

We serve the market today through [a set of] go-to-market practices. We have cyber, we’re full-stack cyber. We have cloud, which breaks into multiple practices. Underneath cloud, we do AWS, we do Google, we do Microsoft primarily, and then we have our FinOps ... and then our GitOps practices, which is where we’re modernizing homegrown applications and we’re managing a life cycle of those applications. Companies can take advantage of the feature set releases in the hyperscalers that are happening quarterly. Like Microsoft and AWS released something like 450 feature sets a quarter, how do you keep up with that? So, when you write an application ... back six, seven years ago, it was cloud-aware, but it was specific to what was available.

Now every one of those applications needs to be modernized. How do you go low code, zero code, how do you then manage the life cycle? You can adopt those new feature sets and take advantage of the full value of those.

Data center modernization is core to what our company’s been doing for over 35 years, We’ve been in a data center space. We’ve evolved with it. ... hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, strategies. That includes co-location. That includes on-prem. That includes edge computing as well as the public clouds. That doesn’t mean you have to consume all of that. But [for] the use case or the business requirements that you’re trying to solve for, we can support that many different ways and securely.

Networking, like I mentioned, is a big practice. Underneath networking, we have carrier services. And we also have collaboration—we just invested in a company that we’ll talk about ... very exciting, bolstering our capabilities in that space.

Have you had customers hit with ransomware and, if so, what was your response to that?

We do a lot of IR [incident response]. We’ve got [a] rigorous response effort. But our goal is to make sure that our customers understand ... how to prepare for that with tabletops, with process, and really understanding some of the things that you need to do.

Have an attorney that’s a cyber attorney because the second you have an incident ... you want to be under the protection of client privilege. ... You can talk to your lawyer, [your] breach expert. ... You also want to connect with your PR teams, you also want to connect with your insurance companies ... we encourage our customers to make sure that we’re written into their insurance plan so they can tap into us because we have that tribal knowledge of their environments. We can react quicker instead of having some company that’s never worked in your environment.

So yes, we regularly are responding to those ... Our SOC is dealing with alerts and investigating, continuously.

The largest attack vector is still by far the end user.

What are some recent developments with Blue Mantis?

We invested in a company last year in Toronto, giving us true near-shore capabilities. We incorporated in Bangalore, India, we’ll have about 200 folks there.

Our ability to create pricing models, to support those outcomes for customers, you know, in the public sector we’re going to be on-shore for example, right?

Look at our ability to deliver value to our services and certainly procurement, we’ve been doing that since we’ve been alive as a company.

We’ve been helping customers design and implement hardware and software, That’s a true function of ours. Holistically, we have the buying power and the critical mass to really give them the enterprise experience at the cost and the value of a midmarket company.