Author Archives: Tori Pazda

CRN honors over 1000 women whose channel expertise and vision are deserving of recognition.

Thrive’s Platform recognized as a strategic business IT transformation solution

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – May 11, 2021 – Thrive has been named a winner of the Gold Stevie® Award in the Best Technical Support Solution – Computer Technologies category for the 19^th Annual American Business Awards®.

The Stevie® Awards are the world’s premier business awards. There are eight Stevie Awards programs, each with its own focus, list of categories, and schedule, including The American Business Awards®, which invites all organizations operating in the U.S. to submit nominations – public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small.

More than 3,800 nominations – a record number – from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration. The winners were determined by more than 250 professionals worldwide.

Thrive was nominated in the Best Technical Support Solution – Computer Technologies category for its Thrive Platform, a unique NextGen IT service delivery and account management platform that guarantees continuous application and performance availability while eliminating IT concerns regarding security, compliance, governance, reliability and scalability.

“We are honored to receive the Gold Stevie Award and want to congratulate all of this year’s winners,” said Rob Stephenson, CEO of Thrive. “Thrive is transforming IT service management for enterprises operating with a remote workforce. Our platform enables businesses to address their IT concerns in one place with the ability to access the portal on any device from anywhere with overall faster service delivery.”

Within the last six months, businesses using the Thrive Platform experienced a 15% increase in end-user productivity, a 25% faster support resolution on complex cases, a 95% reduction in overall delivery time, and a 25% reduction in the client’s time spent on routine IT tasks.

Thrive’s efforts earned praise from the Stevie Awards judging panel:

• “This is an inspirational story of business success. Keep up the good work!”
• “Overall nice support strategy to transform how IT can be done in today’s remote environment where human resources are remote.”
• “Thrive’s software is really great for the SMB segment for bigger companies they can integrate with ServiceNow themselves.”
• “For all those with custom workflows and easy to follow directions Thrive Platform makes life easier.”
• “This product is very important when everyone is working from home, making IT support even more valuable.”

“The American economy continues to show its resilience, and as we’re poised on the beginning of what should be a phenomenal period of growth, we celebrate the remarkable achievements of a wide range of organizations and people over the past 18 months,” said Stevie Awards president Maggie Gallagher.  “This year’s Stevie-winning nominations in The American Business Awards are testament to the ingenuity, the commitment, the passion, the adaptability, and the creativity of the American people.  We look forward to celebrating this year’s winners during our virtual ceremony on June 30.”

Details about The American Business Awards and the list of 2021 Stevie winners are available at www.StevieAwards.com/ABA.

For more information about Thrive, please visit www.thrivenextgen.com.

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About Thrive

Thrive is a leading provider of NextGen managed services designed to drive business outcomes through application enablement and optimization. The company’s Thrive5 Methodology utilizes a unique combination of its Application Performance Platform and strategic services to ensure each business application takes advantage of technology that enables peak performance, scale, and the highest level of security. For more information, visit thrivenextgen.com

Thrive: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram

MEDIA CONTACT:

Stephanie Farrell

Director of Corporate Marketing

617-952-0289 | sfarrell@thrivenextgen.com

About the Stevie Awards

Stevie Awards are conferred in eight programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, the Middle East & North Africa Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards®, The International Business Awards®, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. The Stevies also produce the annual Women|Future Conference.  Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 entries each year from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at http://www.StevieAwards.com.

Congratulations to our own Stephanie Farrell, Director of Corporate Marketing, for being named to the highly respected CRN’s 2021 Women of the Channel List!

The annual list acknowledges accomplished, influential women whose dedication, hard work, and leadership accelerate IT channel advocacy and growth. The women honored on this year’s list  pushed forward with comprehensive business plans, marketing initiatives and other innovative ideas to support their partners and customers, helping them through the uncertainty brought on by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Stephanie is a marketing communications leader with more than 20 years of experience working in the technology and telecom industry. As Director of Corporate Marketing at Thrive, she manages, maintains, and implements marketing initiatives to meet sales targets and exceed Thrive’s business goals for NextGen managed services.

Stephanie works in tandem with our sales teams to ensure channel partners’ have both the technical and sales skills to successfully leverage the Thrive solutions portfolio to their clients. During Stephanie’s 2+ years at Thrive, she has supported or overseen the following accomplishments:

• The integration of 5 acquisitions.
• Enabling our channel partners around Thrive solutions and assisting in positioning with their customers.
• Driving solution-led engagements with our customers.
• Launching programs that maximize resources to increase overall support with our partners.
• Launching fast start initiatives with our partners to ensure they have the training and tools required to succeed.
• Developing our Channel Program with a primary focus on partner experience.
• Crafting our Partner Satisfaction Survey to continue to enhance our program and provide greater value to our partners.
• Developing a Partner Email Campaign program that allows our partners to co-brand and leverage Thrive’s collateral, email marketing campaigns, and marketing automation platform.
• Developing the Channel Partner Resource Page .

The 2021 Women of the Channel list is featured in today’s CRN Magazine. Read more here:  www.CRN.com/WOTC.  Congratulations, Stephanie!

Thrive Leading the Next Generation of Managed Service Providers

Sixth-Annual List Reveals Leading MSPs in Healthcare, Legal, Government, Financial Services & More

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – April 29, 2021 –  Thrive has been named to After Nines Inc.’s ChannelE2E Top 100 Vertical Market MSPs list and research for 2021. The annual list and research (hashtag: #MSP100) identify and honor the top 100 managed services providers (MSPs) in healthcare, legal, government, financial services, manufacturing, and additional vertical markets.

Thrive ranked number three for Financial Services among the top vertical market MSPs.  In addition, Thrive earned the number seven ranking overall in the MSP 100. Both of Thrive’s rankings climbed two spots from 2020.

“Thrive is thrilled to be recognized for single-digit rankings by the MSP community and this prestigious list,” said Rob Stephenson, CEO of Thrive. “These admirable industry rankings reflect Thrive’s growth strategy and commitment to optimize our clients’ business application performance with Thrive’s NextGen Platform of Cloud, Security, Networking, and Business Continuity services, powered by the automation and self-service capabilities of ServiceNow.”

This year’s Top 100 Vertical Market MSP research results are particularly impressive. MSP honorees successfully navigated the coronavirus pandemic and grew their managed annual vertical market revenue 25 percent on average. In stark contrast, total small business revenue in the United States fell 27.5 percent from January 2020 through March 2021, according to TrackTheRecovery.org.

The Top 100 Vertical Market MSPs rankings are based on ChannelE2E’s Q4 2020 and January 2021 readership survey, and ChannelE2E’s vertical market industry coverage. MSPs featured throughout the list and research leverage deep vertical market expertise to drive annual recurring revenues (ARR) in specific market segments.

This year’s research revealed several key MSP market trends, including:

• Honorees generated a combined $1.40 billion in vertical market annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2020, up from $1.12 billion million in 2019. The surge involved organic growth combined with continued merger and acquisition (M&A) activity.
• The most successful vertical market MSPs are zeroing in on healthcare and financial services, while MSPs in the legal and not-for-profit sectors also showed particularly strong growth.
• The Top 100 Vertical Market MSPs now manage more than 3.1 million users across their customer sites as of 2020, up from 2.8 million in 2019.
• MSPs consider their top vertical market technology partners to be Microsoft (58%), Dell Technologies (19%), Cisco Systems (17%), ConnectWise (16%), and Amazon Web Services (14%). Datto, Fortinet, Ingram Micro, and Pax8 also earned a strong MSP response.

“After Nines Inc. congratulates Thrive on this honor,” said Amy Katz, CEO of After Nines Inc. “Businesses worldwide depend on the Top 100 Vertical Market MSPs for cybersecurity, automation, and revenue-generating technology services – especially amid the coronavirus pandemic.”

The ChannelE2E Top 100 Vertical Market MSPs list and research are overseen by Content Czar Joe Panettieri (@JoePanettieri). Find the online list and associated report here: www.channelE2E.com/top100

Thrive has experienced monumental growth through ten acquisitions in under five years. The company continues to enhance its technology portfolio with Thrive’s Microsoft Collaboration and Digital Transformation Services and Thrive’s NextGen Platform of Cloud, Security, Networking, and Business Continuity services. For more information about Thrive, please visit www.thrivenextgen.com

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About Thrive

Thrive is a leading provider of NextGen managed services designed to drive business outcomes through application enablement and optimization. The company’s Thrive5 Methodology utilizes a unique combination of its Application Performance Platform and strategic services to ensure each business application takes advantage of technology that enables peak performance, scale, and the highest level of security. For more information, thrivenextgen.com.

Thrive: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram

MEDIA CONTACT:

Stephanie Farrell

Director of Corporate Marketing

617-952-0289 | sfarrell@thrivenextgen.com

About After Nines Inc.

After Nines Inc. provides timeless IT guidance for strategic partners and IT security professionals across ChannelE2E (www.ChannelE2E.com) and MSSP Alert (www.MSSPAlert.com). ChannelE2E tracks every stage of the IT service provider journey — from entrepreneur to exit. MSSP Alert is the global voice for Managed Security Services Providers (MSSPs).

We are thrilled to announce that Thrive has been named a finalist in the 2021 Excellence in Customer Service Award presented by Business Intelligence Group.

Our Platform was recognized for its innovation and optimization of business performance by equipping customers with highly-secure and adaptable solutions, and guaranteeing continuous application and performance availability while eliminating daily IT concerns regarding security, compliance, governance, reliability, and scalability.

The Thrive Platform has helped enterprises deal with the unexpected shift to a fully-remote workforce caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by allowing customers to address their IT concerns in one place with the ability to access the portal on any device, from anywhere, at any time with overall faster delivery of service.

With The Thrive Platform, our customers experienced a 15% increase in end-user productivity, a 25% faster support resolution on complex cases, a 95% reduction in overall delivery time, and lastly, a 25% reduction in the customers’ time spent on routine IT manual task management.

We are excited to be recognized by the Business Intelligence Group as we keep striving to ensure your business success!

To learn more, click here.

We’re excited to share our “Thrive Employee Spotlight” blog series!

Our featured Thrive Employee is Meghan O’Keefe. Meghan is the Vice President of Professional Services for Thrive.

Meghan currently manages onboarding new clients onto The Thrive Platform and large-scale implementation projects for strategic accounts. Over the years at Thrive, she has also managed the project managers, customer service groups, dispatch coordinators and project engineers.

Meghan lives just north of Boston with her fiancé and rescue pup. In her spare time, you’ll find Meghan at the park or visiting local breweries. In a pre-COVID world, she enjoyed going to Boston sporting events, concerts and traveling. 

Hi Meghan! Can you tell us about your background and how you came to Thrive?

After graduating college, I started my career in retail operations as a district manager at a major grocery chain in New England. At the time, I was responsible for working with all outside vendors, hiring and training all staff, and procuring product and merchandising for all locations in my district. I found what I enjoyed most were the aspects of project management involved in the opening of new store locations. Therefore, I decided to get more involved in project management within a new and highly dynamic industry. After talking with old friends and alums, I found out about a position at Corporate IT Solutions, which would give me the opportunity to help build out a project management office at a growing IT company of 35 employees. This was back in 2012 prior to the Thrive merger, and the major growth we have seen within the last five years. Since then, I’ve managed hundreds of projects and learned an immense amount about technology.

What do you most enjoy about working for Thrive?

Definitely the people! I have been working with many of my colleagues for nine years, and while the company has changed and grown significantly over the years, the caliber of people that I get to work with every day has not.  Everyone shows up to work hard, and we do our best for our clients. I also get to learn something new every day! Technology is constantly changing, and there is always a new challenge to work through. I always feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day knowing we solved a problem or worked around a tough roadblock for one of our clients.

Any recent exciting projects at Thrive that you can tell us about?

We are currently working on automating a lot of our internal processes within the Project Delivery team, which doesn’t sound too exciting, but it will allow us to spend more time with our customers in strategic conversations, and I’m looking forward to that!

Where did you go to school or get training?

I graduated from Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and also have my ITIL and PMP certifications that I completed while at Thrive.

Are you interested in learning more about Thrive? Click here!

And please don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram for the latest news, and continue checking our blog for more in our “Thrive Employee Spotlight” series. Until next time…

The Boston Business Journal has named Thrive to its exclusive 2021 Fast 50 list, which represents the 50 fastest-growing private companies in Massachusetts. The Fast 50 companies are selected and ranked based on a formula that counts revenue growth from 2017 to 2020.

“Thrive is honored to be named to Boston Business Journal’s Fast 50 list,” said Rob Stephenson, CEO at Thrive. “We continue to experience strong growth in Boston and throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. Thrive is an industry leader that successfully optimizes IT business performance with our NextGen Technology Platform, powered by the automation and self-service capabilities of ServiceNow, for organizations across many industries, including financial, healthcare, life sciences, education and more, making them more productive, profitable, and agile.”

The numbers were crunched and analyzed by the Business Journal’s research department.

“The economic shutdown sent a lot of companies’ strategies and financials into uncharted territory in 2020, but as the Fast 50 illustrates, Greater Boston’s fastest-growth companies pivoted and prospered despite it all,” said Carolyn M. Jones, market president and publisher of the Boston Business Journal.

A Fast 50 special publication is scheduled to run in the May 21 weekly edition of the Business Journal and online that same week. A private virtual honoree celebration to honor this year’s Fast 50 is scheduled to be held on Wednesday, May 19, where the rankings will be released.

Companies on the Fast 50 must have their headquarters in Massachusetts and must have reported revenue of at least $500,000 in 2017 and $1 million in 2020 were considered. (Unlike in past years, due to the pandemic, companies were not disqualified from the ranking if they experienced a net loss during one of the years analyzed, provided growth from 2017 to 2020 was positive.)

For the complete list of 2021 Fast 50 companies, visit the Boston Business Journal’s website here.

The FBI recently released a warning on hackers using a trio of vulnerabilities that are present on some Fortinet Firewalls. Attackers are leveraging these three distinct vulnerabilities to gain access to the networks.   

The first vulnerability, CVE-2018-13379, allows an attacker to download firewall system files under the SSL VPN web portal using HTTP.  Attackers scan ports 4443, 8443, and 10443 to see if this is available. If so, they utilize vulnerability CVE-2020-12812 to allow an attacker to log in without using a second factor authentication. Finally, the attackers utilize CVE-2019-5591 to sniff traffic going to a legitimate LDAP server internally. 

Utilizing all three of these attacks allows the attacker to gain more access into the network. Each one of these vulnerabilities is present in different versions of code. If the device runs an earlier version of code then it may require it may require multiple upgrades. 

This is a sophisticated attack, that requires multiple exploitable vulnerabilities to work. Only a select number of firewalls are vulnerable to this attack. Thrive observed that less than 1% of its customer deployments are on the firmware versions contained in this notification. 

In general, our engineering team recommends all Fortinet firewall be upgraded to 6.4.4 if possible. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.