Managed service provider builds scalable workplace-as-a-service business around unified endpoint management

Benefits

• Lowered costs by offering standardized, unified endpoint management
• Scaled out by automating the management of thousands of endpoints
• Separated multiple customers in a single offering, making it ideal for expanding managed services

The Story

“When clients overcome their fears about handing off IT responsibilities such as patching and roll-out, they realize how much time they can save.”

With approximately 3,000 small and medium business (SMB) customers across Germany, teccle group has seen how much time and effort companies can spend just keeping their devices running securely. The MSP’s goal is to be a single resource for consulting, design, implementation and management of their customers’ infrastructure, whether on or off premises, in hybrid or multi-cloud environments.

Building the workplace as a service

teccle group combines the abilities of teams that specialize in infrastructure, collaboration and business applications, then presents those abilities to customers as a one-stop solution. The MSP saw an opportunity to standardize the management of all IT endpoints (devices) through the entire lifecycle in a single, as-a-service offering.

“The problem was that the number of endpoints never stops growing,” says Tilo Beisiegel, vendor management lead at teccle group. “We were looking for a single solution that would let us manage more and more customers’ endpoints without requiring us to hire more and more IT staff. IT skills are relatively scarce, so the more we could automate, the better.”

The MSP surveyed the landscape of products around which they could build their workplace-as-a-service platform. They were against using free and open-source software (FOSS) because they wanted support. Most of their evaluation effort was tied up in complex, time-consuming test implementations of products that were resource-expensive and difficult to learn.

Unified endpoint management from KACE by Quest

Ultimately, teccle group evaluated and licensed KACE Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) solutions, including KACE Systems Management Appliance and KACE Systems Deployment Appliance. The KACE family of products now forms the basis of the workplace-as-a-service product that teccle group offers to their customers.

“KACE products are easy to learn and fast to deploy yet very scalable,” says Beisiegel. “As an MSP, we appreciate that KACE offers endpoint management and security with flexible pricing. They support our customers’ on-premises and cloud-based operations with UEM services in a single offering that we design, create and manage.”

The vast majority of teccle group’s customers are SMBs with 50 to 5,000 employees. Through KACE, they can automate the deployment of software from Microsoft and other vendors. That includes feature updates and patches for any client, regardless of the operating system, network environment or IT infrastructure.

Managing 10,000-plus client systems

teccle group now plays an important role in their customers’ endpoint security strategy, but with far more automation and far less overhead than before. By standardizing device management for existing and new customers, they have greatly simplified UEM: they define security standards for each customer, then maintain those standards across all endpoints.

Optimizing and automating tasks with KACE allows them to manage more than 10,000 client systems. As a result, both teccle group and their customers spend less time on endpoint management and more time on core business activities.

“KACE is ideal for MSPs like us,” says Beisiegel. “It’s a single management solution for all hardware and software, so it saves us the hassle of multiple solutions. Plus, it’s multi-tenant, so we can separate the data of numerous customers in a single system. KACE has allowed us to grow our endpoint management business unencumbered by the shortage of IT skills in the marketplace.”