For Logicworks, a company with decades of experience providing enterprise customers with traditional IT consulting and hosting services, taking a risk and transitioning to an entirely new business model was a natural evolution in its quest to help companies innovate, evolve, and grow through technology.
“We started to see significant customer demand for Amazon Web Services around 2011,” says Marilyn Daly, vice president of marketing at Logicworks. “At first, we contemplated building our own public cloud infrastructure. But we started to see more and more customer traction on AWS and our chief technology officer—who had great foresight into the benefits to be gained by focusing on developing more of a software-driven approach on AWS—recommended we commit to investing our efforts into exploring what our services could look like on AWS.”
The Logicworks team spent almost all of 2013 in R & D, building its expertise and managed services offering on AWS—signaling a departure from the traditional services it had provided to customers.
“We made a conscious decision to go from a high-margin business where we’d found success for decades and take a leap of faith with AWS,” says Daly. “It wasn’t a decision made lightly, but our agenda, portfolio, and priorities have always been driven by customer adoption and seeing where our customers are and where they want to go.”
With a focus on building a practice to help customers in highly regulated industries migrate to, operate on, and optimize workloads on AWS, Logicworks quickly grew and gained the AWS Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner distinction. As the company continued to evolve its practice and achieve more AWS distinctions, it focused on its ability to embody the defining characteristics of a next-generation MSP. The company is now is an audited AWS Managed Service Provider and an AWS Solution Provider. In addition, it holds AWS DevOps, Healthcare, Marketing & Commerce, Migration, and Security competencies.
To the Logicworks team, a next-generation MSP is more than a provider. A next-generation MSP becomes an extension of the customer’s development and operations teams, providing dynamic infrastructure, application resource management, and automation as well as giving active guidance, education, and expertise to help customers optimize their workloads on AWS. “Next-generation MSPs offer more software-driven solutions and take on more of a trusted advisor function to help customers continually optimize on the cloud,” says Daly.
“Our business as a next-generation MSP is to help our customers accelerate their cloud adoption and build their knowledge and understanding of the technology,” says Jason McKay, chief technology officer at Logicworks. “We begin a journey together and over time, we help them optimize their use of AWS and take advantage of new tooling that can help them focus on driving new business value for their company and end users.”
“AWS is a living, breathing platform and there’s a new skill level that’s needed to operate AWS effectively and become a company that customers look to for help taking advantage of AWS innovation on an ongoing basis,” says Sachin Bansal, head of alliances at Logicworks.
“At our core, we’re an engineering company,” says McKay. “The initial transition to AWS and the subsequent evolution of our cloud managed services model has been a really exciting change for the developers and engineers we have on staff.”
The engineering team at Logicworks is interested in working with the latest innovations and technologies. “Becoming a next-generation MSP to support the full customer lifecycle on AWS and continually working to enhance our MSP platform and build in new features and greater automation for the benefit of our clients is a widely embraced charter across the organization,” says McKay. To foster an environment that rewards knowledge and expertise, Logicworks continually invests in the development of its engineers and encourages engineers to take advantage of new AWS training and pursue specialty certifications.
Customers come to Logicworks for help getting started as they digitally transform and seek to take advantage of automation. “We offer both DevOps consulting services and DevOps components baked into our managed services offering including cloud automation, container services and tooling, infrastructure-as-code services, and continuous integration/continuous deployment delivery services,” says McKay.
Using AWS-native tooling and AWS frameworks and best practices, Logicworks developed two tools for its managed service practice: Central Automation and Pulse. The Central Automation platform is an enterprise deployment engine for configuring cloud computing systems. Pulse is an infrastructure-as-code platform specifically engineered to meet the needs of enterprises running mission-critical applications in the cloud.
“Using AWS native tooling provides our customers and us with greater access to robust AWS features, increases our confidence in the security and compliance posture, and drives efficiencies in cost, transparency, and scalability,” says McKay.
Pulse is a fully-automated platform made available at no extra charge to all of Logicworks’ customers. It integrates with third-party applications for security, performance, and billing monitoring. The platform uses serverless computing technologies like AWS Lambda to enable customers to manage infrastructure-as-code environments. Pulse also leverages machine learning capabilities via Amazon Macie—an AWS-native security service that automatically discovers, classifies, and protects sensitive data in AWS—to help enterprise customers improve security posture through powerful insights and automated data discovery.
“Pulse was initially designed as a cloud management platform,” says McKay. “It has continuously evolved and is vital in helping us provide consistent and transparent monitoring and management for customers.”
By pivoting its business model from a traditional MSP to become a next-generation MSP on AWS, Logicworks has improved its technical capabilities, expanded its market reach globally, been able to support new markets and industries, and driven substantial revenue growth.
“The bet we made on AWS back in 2013 has really paid off,” says Daly. “We experienced over 587 percent revenue growth in the first couple of years on AWS and we continue to grow significantly year-over-year. We are helping hundreds of customers annually with both professional services as well as ongoing managed services.”
The team at Logicworks believes its value proposition as an AWS MSP will only continue to increase as enterprises seek to migrate more production-ready workloads to AWS and increase competitive advantage through faster development and delivery cycles.
“As they continue to migrate to and build on AWS, enterprise clients need guidance to adapt, modify, and optimize their workloads to take advantage of all AWS has to offer,” says Daly. “They’re looking for a partner with the expertise to address specific challenges they face today and the challenges they may face tomorrow. Working with a next-generation MSP like Logicworks, who has helped hundreds of customers securely build, operate, and optimize on AWS, gives enterprise clients the peace of mind to let go of the burden of IT management and focus on what’s core to growing their business.”
Logicworks partnered with NextGate, a global healthcare enterprise identification software. NextGate is the only provider of a fully-managed, SaaS-based Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) platform that runs on AWS.
EMPI platforms are critical for hospitals and healthcare providers who need to quickly and accurately distinguish a patient’s name and medical records from others with the same name. By launching their EMPI platform on AWS, NextGate’s mission was to help its customers flexibly and cost-effectively deploy the EMPI without having to install the software on their own servers.
To accelerate its product launch, NextGate turned to Logicworks to architect, build, manage, and support its EMPI deployment on AWS. NextGate engaged Logicworks to assist in assessing its current on-premises systems, build out a foundational, HIPAA-compliant AWS “Landing Zone”, migrate data, and test the system. Logicworks continues to provide 24-7 technical support and a fully-managed service for NextGate’s AWS environment. As the company adds new customers to the platform, Logicworks plays a key role in helping them replicate infrastructure using AWS CloudFormation and configuration management.
“Logicworks helped us avoid common AWS migration mistakes and make informed choices about preparing our application for the AWS Cloud. They helped us design, migrate, and launch an AWS environment that meets our high IT security and compliance standards,” says Tom Ezell, cloud operations manager at NextGate.
“We’ve significantly accelerated our time-to-market on AWS—helping us bring value to providers faster. Healthcare providers no longer want the hassle of maintaining software and servers. We want to help organizations leverage the kinds of IT services and tools that help them transform their business and ultimately improve the delivery, safety, and quality of patient care. Companies like NextGate that leverage the power of AWS to launch secure, cloud-based software will give healthcare leaders the needed affordability and flexibility to meet the demands of a digitally interconnected, information-rich ecosystem.”
Click here to learn more about the work Logicworks has done with NextGate.
Learn more about Logicworks’ cloud compliance solutions.
Logicworks is an AWS consulting and managed services provider with 25 years of experience in enterprise IT. Their team of certified engineers design, automate, and manage custom AWS infrastructure. Logicworks is known for its expertise in complex infrastructure for industries with high security and compliance requirements, including finance, healthcare, and retail.
