Highlight is finding that its visibility and analytics systems is being mandated by clients of managed services. While acknowledging that it is still rare for such a condition to be put into RFP or tenders, Edmund Cartwright (pictured), Sales and Marketing Director tells IT Europa: “Yes, we have seen a few RFPs that mandate Highlight as part of the BID/ tender which have forced the Network Service Provider to contact us to help them to respond appropriately to the RFP.”
He relates how a large retailer asked its network service provider for Highlight monitoring and reporting across its entire IT estate. “Initially, the provider was delayed by its head office because it required that Highlight was added to its global product portfolio. Now with the new Managed Service offering, the local provider can deliver Highlight to the enterprise customer without delay by including it as a simple resell of a third-party professional service and appearing as a straight invoicing item. No need to productise Highlight or secure a political stamp of approval.”
“We operate a SaaS channel business model which is sold predominantly to MSPs/MNSPs. And we do get approached by large corporate enterprises to respond to their RFPs privately.”
Highlight’s partner MSPs can see which enterprise corporate customer they have using Highlight. Tenders and requests for proposals from corporate enterprise customers are private documents and are normally under NDA. Only the service providers who have received the tender / RFP may check if Highlight is mandated within this private communication from the corporate enterprise.
New Highlight Managed Services just announced enable service providers to avoid the process and cost of productising Highlight through their internal systems, he says. “Service provider sales teams can now resell Highlight as a professional service without complication while adding profitable margin, to deliver service performance transparency to their customers,” he says. Highlight won an Award at last year's Managed Services Summit in London.for Best Cloud Platform-based Managed Service Solution.
“We also try to build communication and relationships with Gartner, IDC, and researchers who influence MSPs/MNSPs and corporate enterprises’ supplier consideration processes. They tend to NOT recommend specific suppliers but in reality there are certain conditions which might yield the result which came from a bit of research that showed a supplier in a brighter light,” he adds.
