In your own words, can you tell us what Atria does and how did it come into being?
Atria has had a long and interesting life, the original concept for self-service was introduced to support Managed telco services 20+ years ago. The platform did two unique things:
- Allowed expensive enterprise systems to be shared across many customers.
- Enabled customers to self-serve these services
At the start, the core services were managed firewall, mail filtering and web filtering. This was very advanced for its time, but it maybe took another 10 years before the need for internet security became mainstream. After security, we transformed the product to enable Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business (previously Lync,OCS, RTC!) to also be multi-tenanted – this allowed Telcos and Hosting companies to offer Office 365 type services at an affordable price point. Alongside this, we were perhaps the first vendor which enabled service providers to offer Desktop as a Service at scale.
Today Atria is a platform which enables Service Providers to streamline and simplify the management of their customers, whether they are in the cloud, on premises, shared or private infrastructure.
There are three values we try to deliver on:
- Error and risk reduction – Supporting many customers is complex, by automating, there is less reliance on human process.
- Improving Working Lives – IT is tough, a lot of admin work can be tedious for the poor IT admins, a lot of people get frustrated with IT because they are always waiting for service. Service Desk staff are often not empowered or over powered. Our goal is to make our MSPs deliver better service faster, remove boring jobs from engineers, and enable service desk staff to deliver great service.
- MSPs that use Atria are able to service more businesses.
What has changed since you took over Atria from Citrix?
We have worked hard to build closer relationships with our customers and because we are a smaller organization we are able to move with a bit more freedom. A lot has changed in the industry and although Citrix is still a key partner for us, we are also able to work more freely with other vendors and partners to better support the needs of our MSP customers.
Tell us more about your background within the MSP space?
I started my career as a Software Developer in the 90s, I was lucky to start working in the Web 1.0 age with the dawn of internet delivered applications. At my second role at Sage Software, we were designing PoCs to deliver Multi-tenant applications over the web – this never made it to production, but the concept of an “Application Service Provider” was being considered. In the 2000s I moved to a .com start-up and as part of that role, I was responsible for IT infrastructure – that gave me knowledge of things like Active Directory, SQL server, Internet Bandwidth etc.
When I moved to NZ – I again worked with IT infrastructure and Hosting Services at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise before joining EMS-global as Development Manager. I guess my main experience here was working with our customers and the talent in our team to build what became Atria.
After joining and subsequently leaving Citrix, I was lucky to work for one of Atria’s customers – Lucidity Cloud Services – based in Auckland. For 5 years I worked with the directors to grow the business, along the way, learning many of the real challenges facing MSPs supporting hundreds of customers on a limited budget. I guess I have a lot of real empathy for the people that work in the industry.
What is your long-term strategic vision for the future of Atria?
The challenges associated with storing and securing Information systems are becoming a problem for every size of business. MSPs are responsible for a good chunk of the services delivered to most businesses globally but most of the tools available only really deal with tickets, are device based, or help automate infrastructure.
Atria is about people, it’s centered on individual end-users and delivering the things each individual end-user needs to do their work as quickly as possible. Today we can support many of the common applications and services such as Microsoft 365, Active Directory, DNS etc – longer term we want to enable an ecosystem of third-party products and services allowing MSPs to provide more control, empowerment and efficiency to their customers.
What are the top 3 short-term goals for Atria?
- Delivering our improved Workspace management features to customers
- Completing the update of our Microsoft 365 features to work with Microsoft’s New Commerce Experience.
- Driving adoption of our private cloud management features
How do you feel about the forever-changing technical landscape in the MSP world?
I think this is a given in our industry, there is always new innovation, but handling change is something humans are not very good with – MSPs smooth that process out for customers, they deal with the technical change and allow the customer to focus on running their business.
More independent single solution apps exist today in most businesses, but data has dispersed across many cloud providers, maintaining and securing infrastructure requires deep skills and mature process. Maintaining, Operating, Supporting, Securing all of these systems and their data is a big challenge for those that think it’s important. Managed Service Providers with solid systems and processes will continue to be in demand to steer customers through the minefield of IT.
What do you think is the advantage of using Atria over the competition?
Atria has two standout things that make it different:
- It has always been made for Service Providers – that is it inherently deals with supporting multiple customers. There are lots of great identity and provisioning tools for the enterprise, but it’s definitely a different problem space.
- Flexibility, a framework that can model anything into a “service” and flexibility to change the automation process. This allows an MSP to productise, model, automate and delegate responsibilities.
What services do you feel are a great fit for Atria and which products would you like to see Atria natively work with?
At the moment we really help with the traditional side of IT – desktop and application management combined with Microsoft 365 services. We are wanting to add more security and backup services – both of which are showing increased demand. We will focus on channel friendly services, those that have an ecosystem and a model which works for MSPs. If anyone reading this has ideas, always keen to chat.
What do you believe are the best features of Atria and why?
My #1 thing – is the spotlight search – find any user, regardless of where they are (across customers) and make changes.
What do you think your employees would say about your leadership style?
I like to think that I’m always honest, fair, supportive but at times can be a bit pushy, I am a bit impatient, sometimes hard to please and have a British sense of humour, which isn’t always well understood.. I’m detail oriented, like numbers and might at times get over involved in technical details or solutioning problems.
How involved are you in the daily operations of Atria? Do you ever work on support tickets?
I have waves of deeper involvement depending on staff situations and customer pressure, I HATE bad customer service and will help steer solutions or motivate staff if I see things being delayed or going off track. I am often involved in product conversations and enjoy taking time to talk with our customers.
Now some fun questions:
Tell us something we don’t know about you?
My first proper job was in production engineering – for a company that made giant valves for oil rigs – awesome engineering but quite different to Atria!
Atria is orange and red and dark blue, is that one of your favorite colors if not, what is your favorite color?
I do really like the deep orange color and the Atria logo, It’s bold and stands out from the crowd, the orange in our brand also relates to our friends in the Netherlands – a country where we have lots of customers who have always been great to work with.
Do you have any pets? (Everyone likes pet people)
Until last week we had two dogs, sadly we now have one dog Rupert, he’s by my side all the time – wherever I go all day, until my daughter goes to bed – then he sleeps next to her until the morning. Love Dogs and their enthusiasm for life, happiness and loyalty. In the past have also had horses, sheep, cows, cats, rabbits 😊
What would your dream vacation destination be?
New Zealand is an amazing place to live, but I do miss the depth of history and architecture of Europe. I would love to spend some extended time to explore Western Europe. I am really not good at relaxing, always like to be doing something and seeing something new.
What is the most exciting thing you have done?
This is a hard question! I think the most exciting thing I’ve done was pack up everything and move to New Zealand with the family, I’d personally never been here before. It was literally leaving everything and going to the other side of the world!
