Bespin Global Focuses on Automation to Deliver a Next-Generation MSP Experience

Bespin Global’s mission has always centered on helping enterprises take advantage of everything cloud. After all, the company’s name is inspired by the fictional Star Wars planet Bespin, a planet comprised of endless clouds.

“From day one, we wanted to do two things: provide services as a trusted advisor to enterprise customers adopting cloud and use software and automated processes to simplify the services we deliver," says Hoon Park, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Bespin Global. "We started with managing cloud infrastructure and then evolved to offer professional services and database managed services. We then became much more involved in cloud integration and application development work for our customers, and we continue to evolve in anticipation of customers’ needs.”

Today, Bespin Global is an AWS Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner, a member of the AWS MSP Partner Program, and holds the AWS Migration Competency. Bespin Global had also been recognized as the Rising Star in 2017 and the Innovation Partner of the Year in 2018 by the AWS Korea team.

With a sharp focus on the Korean and Chinese markets, the company has worked with over 600 enterprise customers over the past three years. Currently, 50 percent of its revenue comes from its managed services practice and professional services. The Bespin team credits its continuous focus on evolution, prioritization of automation, and its ability to build a strong internal team with its success building a next-generation managed services practice.  

To become a next-generation managed services provider, Bespin Global knew automation needed to be its principal focus. "Our mission is to create the most automated cloud management company in the world. But we understand that doesn’t happen from day one. We’ve been thoughtful in figuring out how and what we can automate to make our services more efficient and fundamentally change the customer experience,” says Park. The Bespin team focuses its automation efforts in software and services develop, customer education, and internal initiatives.

The company provides its customers with OpsNow, automated software built in-house that serves as a cloud management platform. OpsNow is focused on delivering cost optimization recommendations and solutions to Bespin Global customers. “We are developing our internal software platform using container services and a microservices architecture to develop and launch new features to customers faster,” says Park. The company also uses CI/CD tools to provide CI/CD pipelines within the customer’s environment. Bespin Global uses tooling from an extensive ecosystem of local and global vendors, such as Ansible and Commvault, to helps customers take advantage of automation at each stage of the cloud journey. The company also provides professional services to help customers embrace a DevOps mentality and refactor their applications for the cloud by taking an automate-everything approach.

Crucial for Bespin Global has been the internal development of its software-based MSP practice and its ability to expand its internal tracking measures through automation. The Bespin team uses automation across its platform and services to reduce human errors and increase productivity. For example, the company has implemented automated event and issue management, automated asset and performance management, and automated network and patch management.

“As we continue to embrace a new managed services approach, our cloud experts must also change,” says Park. “Our key measurement for success is: Are our customers happy? And as the scope of what customers need has become more complex as we’ve built our next-generation MSP practice, it becomes more challenging to measure what it means to keep customers happy. Our cloud experts have started to measure, through automated tooling, the kinds of services they’re providing for the customers, different success metrics, and the customers' response." 

Bespin Global is focusing its efforts on continuing to develop a data-driven business model. The company’s goal is to help enterprises understand how they can navigate business challenges and address different use cases with data. Bespin currently has over 100 data managed services cloud experts on staff and is strategically focusing on helping customers seeking to take advantage of data.

Essential for the Bespin Global team is its development of an artificial intelligence (AI) operations strategy. "We're automating the service elements in our software, and when we fully automate our operations, we believe we'll be able to take fully take advantage of AI," says Brad Yun Lee, CEO and co-founder of Bespin Global China. “We’ve already implemented AI into the OpsNow platform through AlertNow, a software as a service (SaaS)-based incident lifecycle management platform which automates all of our alerts, consolidates, categorizes, and sends the alerts to the right people within the organization. AI will continue to help us response to customers in the most efficient ways we can." Through its AlertNow system, Bespin has been able to reduce fault recognition and disaster recovery time by more than 50 percent.

The Bespin team believes customers need a different kind of cloud expert to take full advantage of AWS. The company continues to build its internal technical expertise and is focused on helping customers understand how they can use the cloud to meet business challenges. Currently, Bespin Global’s team in Korea holds over 400 AWS Certifications of which 170 are Professional Certifications, and its China team holds 190 AWS Certifications of which 70 are Professional Certifications.

While technical expertise is crucial, Park and his team feel that what sets a provider like Bespin apart is the ability to understand and respond to a customer’s business challenges and use cases. For example, while conducting a cloud transformation project for a customer, Bespin proposed a need for and business opportunities that could arise from demand and component-related forecasting using equipment operation information collected from a proprietary remote management system. As a result, Bespin worked with the customer to build a demand forecasting and parts estimation system using Amazon SageMaker.

“A cloud expert serving as a trusted advisor for customers must be more business-oriented and proactive,” says Park. “A next-generation MSP can help a customer digitally transform. It's crucial to help customers understand how they can use the AWS Cloud, and focus on areas like Big Data, to drive new business opportunities and increase revenue. It's possible through cloud technology." 

Hyundai Construction Equipment is a subsidiary of Hyundai Heavy Industries Group, which manufactures and sells of construction machinery and industrial vehicles. The company has developed a remote management system for construction equipment called Hi-MATE that uses Internet of Things (IoT) and telecommunication technology. It collects construction equipment information through satellite communication and mobile communication by connecting tens of thousands of pieces of equipment and providing location information, operation information, fault alarms, and consumables management services.

Hyundai’s Hi-MATE system collects massive amounts of data from construction equipment used all over the world. However, the Hyundai team struggled to manage, maintain, and derive insights and analytics from its data due to a lack of in-house expertise and tooling, inability to process and connect related data, and obstacles connecting analysis results with current workloads and projects.

The company decided to take a data-driven approach to decision-making by migrating its Hi-MATE applications to AWS, and then taking advantage of AWS to enhance its cloud analytics tooling and capabilities and develop demand forecast technology to better utilize its data. Hyundai chose to engage Bespin Global as a trusted managed services partner to begin its data systemization and machine learning initiative, referred to as the Digital Market Model (DMM) project.

Bespin worked closely with the Hyundai team and Hi-MATE operation staff to understand the Hi-MATE system and environment. Bespin then built a big data platform and data lake in AWS using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), developed a decision-making support system using big data, and built a demand forecasting system using Amazon SageMaker. The team also built a machine learning/deep learning environment and implemented algorithms for data analysis.

Bespin built a platform on AWS that enables Hyundai users to easily identify information including the operational status of equipment, sales status, and demand forecasting of construction equipment. Hyundai also upgraded its Hi-MATE operational system and environment by taking advantage of Amazon SageMaker for its machine learning environment, Tableau for data visualization, and Amazon Relational Database System (Amazon RDS).

Hyundai drives high demand forecasting accuracy using Amazon SageMaker. For example, its demand forecasting of construction equipment in the overall market showed 75 percent accuracy.