Book demo
26 February 2018

Predatar goes to Las Vegas – IBM Think 2018

Enterprise Challenge

Today’s complex IT infrastructures are demanding new ways to manage and protect data.

The burden of owning and operating complex data protection systems is driving many  companies to investigate alternative ownership models.

Service Provider Opportunity

In recent years, consumption-based delivery models for IT services have exploded in popularity.

As increasing numbers of businesses look for ways to spend less time, effort and resources on IT, your long-term success depends on capturing a share of the emerging managed services market.

Data protection is a hot but crowded market. How will you differentiate your BaaS portfolio?

The Problem

It’s one thing to start a Managed Services practice, it’s another thing entirely to scale it and make money. 

The challenge is keeping service levels high and operating costs low. The barriers to attaining MSP status, including cost, headcount, and infrastructure requirements, have prevented many businesses from achieving this transformation. 

Customer churn and a high cost of service delivery can kill the profitability of a Managed Services business. 

Enter Predatar

If you’ve dreamt of building and growing a profitable, sustainable data protection services business, then Predatar can help make it a reality.

We offer value-added resellers the opportunity to establish new revenue streams with their own-branded data protection offerings; converting transactional buyers into loyal, engaged customers.

How do we do this?

Technology

The Predatar platform is a complete systems management solution used by service providers to manage enterprise data protection offerings built with the IBM Storage Protect Suite

Business Process

Becoming an MSP means rethinking everything; not just technology but processes too.

The Predatar Evolution Framework encompasses everything you need for a smooth and profitable transition.

Commercial models

Predatar enables service providers to offer customers more innovative and flexible pricing aligned with their actual consumption

 

Meet with the Predatar team while at IBM Think and we’ll give you a free Predatar t-shirt.

Drop a note to info@predatar.com to book your slot

 

 

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Predatar recovery assurance

20 February 2018

Is Artificial Intelligence essential to MSP success?

More than a century ago, the Russian mathematician, Andrey Andreyevich Markov laid the foundations for much of the machine learning used in today’s driver-less cars and chatbot technology. He studied 20,000 letters in Evgeny Onegin, a poem by the grandfather of Russian classical literature, Aleksandr Pushkin, to predict the probability of vowels and consonants occurring in the text.

It’s a pity he had not been around a 100 years earlier to advise Pushkin on the probability of serious harm if you challenge your love rival to a duel!

To understand if Markov’s Models are relevant to the success of your MSP practice, try answering the following question?

How many times has your customer service desk received a support ticket for a problem solved in the past?

The chances are, if you have been successful for any length of time, the answer is many, many times.

The Problem

As the service provider grows it can face the following problems:

  • Repetitive tasks can lead to boredom and lack of employee engagement
  • Simple tasks repeated over and over again can be costly to service
  • It can be time consuming and expensive to capture and recycle knowledge

The Promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The market opportunity for service providers is expected to grow but increasingly there will be greater competition for profitable customers.

AI can help stave off commoditisation and margin erosion with the following benefits:

  • Done right, AI can improve the customer service experience
  • Reduce the time spent fixing problems
  • Allow expensive resources to be re-allocated to higher level processes
  • Improve profit margins
  • Give you a competitive advantage

What do you need to get started?

First of all you need a lot of data to train your machine learning engine. The second thing you need is an easy-to-use interface to your new features and services. This requirement has driven an explosion in the development of chatbot technology and programming languages such as Python.

There are two types of chatbot. Bots that risk trying to parse anything you type at them, and bots that limit your input to a few safe buttons or keywords.  In the former, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is not looking for keywords in your text, like a search engine. Instead, it uses machine-learned pattern recognition to match what you say to an “intent” which has been “classified”, which means the bot has been trained to look for certain things.

Acquiring the training data and the time to program your chatbot may not be possible for every MSP but not to worry, the Predatar team has been busy working on a solution, for the benefit of our partners.

The Predatar Service Chatbot

It’s long been known that men don’t like asking for directions when lost. This is probably also true for IT experts when faced with a support issue. That’s why we have built up an extensive knowledge base so that he (or she) can ask the chatbot for help without fear of loss of face.

For every knowledge base article we have had to think “what question is this article helping to answer?”. We wrote multiple questions for each of the 2000+ articles. All the questions, answers and topics created the data set which was fed into our NLP engine to build a chatbot that can understand questions, rather than just keywords, and reply with the relevant knowledge base article(s).

NLP means that if the user does not input the exact question, the bot will still return the right answer.

Once launched, we will retrain the chatbot by studying the questions users are asking on a daily basis and storing this information in the database.

Finally

If you have been researching AI to grow your business, we would love to hear from you. Drop us a note at info@predatar.com or why not make an appointment to meet the team at IBM Think 2018 in Las Vegas from 19th – 22nd March.

Learn more about
Predatar recovery assurance