MSP Lewan Technology Monitoring 'Just About Anything' As Services Sales Surge

Fast-growing managed service provider Lewan Technology increased services sales last year by more than 20 percent thanks to its monitoring-as-a-service (MaaS) solution, which uses LogicMonitor.

"LogicMonitor has proven it can monitor just about anything," said Scott Pelletier, CTO of Lewan, in an interview with CRN. "We look at LogicMonitor as a way to bridge that cloud gap and move higher in the stack up to a customer's business process, not just their IT functions. We can monitor processes as well as the technology."

Lewan's MaaS offering cuts troubleshooting time down "dramatically" and enables the solution provider to have 24/7 monitoring without having to increase headcount, said Pelletier.

[Related: Beer Taps, Deep Fryers AndBBQ Smokers: 5 Unique Ways MSPs Are Using LogicMonitor To Enable IoT]

"It can notify people proactively. So we didn't need as much manual monitoring. The technology itself has allowed us to tune it so it feels like a human watching for us in the middle of the night," said Pelletier. "The customers are getting 24/7 support but we don’t necessarily have to staff that way for some of the functions we're providing."

The Denver-based solution provider, named on CRN's 2018 Managed Service Provider 500 list, said its MaaS offering is becoming an integral part of its overall approach to services after about 18 months since launching. LogicMonitor's SaaS-based performance monitoring platform represents about 35 percent of the Lewan's total managed services sale, while the company's annual services revenue up more than 20 percent in 2017, according to industry veteran Fred Cannataro, president and CEO of Lewan.

"It's important to customers to have this platform that enables them to be more proactive in managing their environment as oppose to constantly being reactive," said Cannataro. "When we show them the one pane of glass for monitoring, it's impressive and reinforces the value we can deliver."

Lewan's MaaS provides proactive management, monitoring and support across servers, networking, phone systems, workstations and applications, to name a few. It automatically lets customers know, for example, when a drive is nearly capacity as well as an overview of circuits and how data is flowing.

"Having that level of depth of inspection really helps us out," said Pelletier. "The way LogicMonitor organizes their events or alarms, we can very quickly navigate to something like, 'I want to see the graphs at the time the alert happened.' I don’t have to do scroll back in time. It automatically gives you that view of what the graphs looked like when the alert happened. It cuts troubleshooting time down dramatically. It can also look for patterns."

Due to the solution's ability to monitor everything from on-premise to cloud environments and from applications to physical devices, Lewan is starting to win deals around the Internet of Things.

IoT deals for Lewan's MaaS solution include a brewing company seeking to make sure its beer, refrigerators, fans and coolers are all closely monitored. "It's really bad if your cooler fails, then all your beer gets warm. We are getting those types of requests now," said Pelletier.

Another IoT win came from a food manufacturer wanting to make sure they had a controlled environment for making cheese. "The universe of devices are expanding," said Cannataro. "It really becomes a portal to possibilities in expanding our business relationship with the customer. We can monitor the performance of an existing environment, the current state, and provide more substantive recommendations for how to improve that environment over time."

Lewan offers three levels of support, including its Always On Support that includes 24/7 monitoring, management and a technical help desk across the customer's entire IT environment.

"The potential for growth in the managed services space is virtually unlimited," said Cannataro.

Lewan, which also has a strong focus on printing management, was founded in 1972 and currently has 10 offices in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico.