The new platform begins with six complex new services around Microsoft Office 365 and Azure, which provide a new revenue opportunity in themselves and will let partners sell professional services on top.

At the Microsoft Inspire event in Las Vegas, managed services automation provider BitTitan has launched Voleer, a new automation platform, designed to provide IT service providers with new services around cost optimization and security assessments. The six services available at launch are all for Microsoft solutions, specifically Office 365 and the Azure cloud. Other vendor services are being assessed, however.

“Voleer reflects the evolution of the IT service provider market, which is a very conservative landscape,” said Geeman Yip, BitTitan’s CEO. “When Microsoft would release software, companies didn’t adopt it until SP1. It was even worse for IT service providers {ITSPs], because they had to make sure that things worked fully.”

Yip said that Voleer provides the tools to create more recurring revenue.

“The challenge that many ITSPs face is the need to convert their revenue to monthly recurring revenue,” he stated. “Many ITSPs are still primarily systems integrators. Many didn’t want to change because they wanted to do professional services, but that’s not a great business solution. Voleer makes them more profitable by letting them introduce profitable new services, while also still being able to do the professional services.”

The Voleer platform gives access to a vast automation library that includes ready-made templates which are able to turn a large array of manual and tool-driven activities into a single button that creates a report that is both concise and complex.

“What makes it unique is that it is where the cloud is going,” Yip stated. “Voleer is brand new and was written from the ground up to address these uses. ITSPs need help in managing all these applications. This solves the IT problems of all these fragmented SaaS applications. Even the smallest company is adopting dozens of SaaS applications.”

Yip said that while the library differentiates BitTitan, they will be expanding its reach by open sourcing the technology.

“We are opening up the library from a transparency perspective,” he indicated. “We will be open sourcing all our technologies to run in the cloud, over the next six to twelve months.”

At launch, six services will be available.

“We have three services around cost optimizations and three around security assessments, all of which are quite complex,” Yip said. “These six services are for Office 365 and Azure. We are still evaluating Google, examining what services would make sense there and we think we will see some other complementary things.”

As far as any future services, Yip said that aren’t really ready to announce anything yet, but that it would be logical to expect that security and compliance functionality would be a big component.

Initial reaction at Inspire has been strong.

“We demonstrated this to our customers yesterday, and people were blown away,” Yip stated. “This is a huge problem that exists today. Every single provider can relate to the assessments we perform. We are targeting all our existing IT service providers around the world. They have the ability to be providing assessment for their customers with Voleer. That in turn leads to additional opportunities for remediation through professional services.”

They can also do this, Yip stressed, without expensive investments in specialists.

“They don’t have to have experts on staff to be the ace of something,” he said. “At a fraction of the cost, this lets them get the equivalent of their credentials by answering the right questions and pressing one button. They don’t need any credentials other than Voleer.”

ITSPs can sign up now for a free account.

“Voleer offers a ‘Forever Free plan, so it is free in a SOHO environment – for a couple of customers,” Yip indicated. “So they can provide free assessments starting today. There only becomes a cost when they scale it up.”