Let’s Connect and Get Analytical

A lot has been said about Mark Hurd since his fall from grace at Hewlett-Packard, but the one thing that his detractors can’t take away is his aptitude for analyzing data and making rational business decisions. It’s a skill sorely missing in the channel, mostly because of the lack of tools and information.

Earlier this week, analytics vendor CoreConnex inked a deal to extend its Corelytics Financial Dashboard to members of MSP University. The distribution deal is similar to a deal CoreConnex struck with CompTIA in June. The idea is to give solution providers of these respective organizations a tool that encapsulates their financial performance for easy analysis. Through MSP University, solution providers can order Corelytics “Lite” and “Standard” versions. Through CompTIA, solution providers receive a free version of Corelytics “Lite.” Versions with greater capabilities and functionality require additional subscriptions.

Corelytics and other business intelligence tools are an absolute necessity for running a technology business. Through financial metrics, solution providers can gain a better understanding of their sales, revenue and profitability in ways they simply cannot by reading spreadsheets. As Hurd once said (and I’m paraphrasing): If you interrogate the numbers, you’ll find the answer. 

What makes Corelytics different from other financial and accounting applications is its community nature. It draws and aggregates the financial performance of all users to provide comparative analyses of like-sized companies. Situational analysis is another element that missing in the analytical capabilities of many solution providers. Only by comparing performance to a relative set of companies will a solution provider understand their performance in the larger market.

Some solution providers may feel uneasy about giving up their financial data for community comparisons. It’s not an unfounded concern. If a competitor knows your pricing, costs, revenue and profitability, they can pretty much draw a map for undermining your business. This is where CoreConnex is smart; it’s aggregation of data makes it possible to anonymize the source, and segregating comparative sets by company characteristics and demographics.

Comparative analysis is something large enterprises and IT vendors engage in all the time. They pay financial and industry analysts millions of dollars to conduct research and crunch numbers to come up with benchmarks for financial performance, market share and relative market position. Most solution providers cannot afford to engage with Gartner and IDC, which makes the Corelytics platform that much more attractive. 

Imagine for a moment the benefits of having at your fingertips not just a snapshot of your fiscal health with a relative comparison of the mean fiscal health of companies that share your size, technology disciplines, geographic reach and target market. It’s not enough to make comparison against internal performance data – year-over-year growth, progress toward goals. You need a third point of reference – an external point of reference – to know whether the goals are valid and obtainable, and how well you stack up.

CoreConnex started out as a professional services automation (PSA) vendor that included financial analytics. Rather than competing with the likes of Autotask, ConnectWise and TigerPaw, the company’s executive team decided to exit the PSA business and integrate its analytics with these leading platforms. This means users of these PSA tools can draw services performance data into the analytics.

What makes a system like CoreConnex Corelytics work is participation. Through distribution deals as the ones with MSP University and CompTIA, CoreConnex is looking to sign thousands of solution providers into using its platform. The more users in the system, the richer the analytics and comparative benefits will become.

With so much uncertainty about sales, revenue and financial stability, can solution providers afford to operate without having quick and actionable data on their performance? No, and that’s what makes these deals between CoreConnex and these leading channel organizations so important. It’s a tool that leads to better understanding and better business performance.