Author Archives: Tori Pazda

CRN assembles a number of lists and rankings throughout the year, including the Solution Provider 500, the Fast Growth 150 and the Tech Elite 250. CRN recognizes the 44 solution providers that earned a spot on all three lists this year with the annual Triple Crown honors.

Making this year’s Triple Crown list for the second consecutive year is managed services provider Thrive, offering next-generation cloud, cybersecurity, disaster recovery and global network management technology services.

Based in Foxborough, Mass., Thrive (No. 278 on the CRN Solution Provider 500) targets mid-market clients offering the kind of sophisticated services customers might expect from an IBM or Cognizant, according to CEO Rob Stephenson, but with the more personal service of a smaller MSP. (Thrive was No. 54 on this year’s Fast Growth 150 list with 81.52 percent two-year average growth.)

CRN Triple Crown Award Program Recognizes Exceptional IT Solution Providers

Thrive, a premier provider of NextGen Managed Services, announces today that CRN^®, a brand of The Channel Company, has recognized Thrive as a 2020 Triple Crown Award winner. This is Thrive’s second consecutive year making the Triple Crown list.

CRN Triple Crown Award winners are among the largest IT solution providers in North America from a revenue standpoint on the Solution Provider 500 list, while ranking as one of the fastest-growing organizations in the channel with recognition on the Fast Growth 150 list, and have received the highest-level certifications from leading vendors on the Tech Elite 250 list. While it is an impressive accomplishment for a solution provider to earn a spot on any of these elite lists, being named to all three in the same year is a great honor that should receive special acknowledgement and celebration.

For the seventh year, the Triple Crown Award recognizes solution providers that hold themselves to the highest standard in the IT channel. It is awarded to the top solution providers in North America based on revenue, growth, and technical expertise.

“Triple Crown Award winners have attained the ultimate achievement — the trifecta — they are among the top solution providers in North America by revenue, have seen more substantial growth than many of their peers over the past year, and continue to establish and build upon the technical skills that help them provide customers with the highest level of service in the IT channel,” said Blaine Raddon, CEO of The Channel Company. “We are honored to award these solution providers the Triple Crown Award for their expertise and exceptional contributions to the channel, and we are excited to see where they go from here.”

This year’s Triple Crown Award winners will be featured in the October issue of CRN Magazine — they can also be found online at www.crn.com/triplecrown.

Interested in learning more? CONTACT US TODAY!

The Week Ending Oct. 9

Next-Generation MSP Thrive Expands Application Services Capabilities With Timlin Acquisition

Thrive, a Massachusetts-based managed services provider that has focused heavily on next-generation IT infrastructure and cloud services, is expanding its applications services offerings with a strategic acquisition.

This week Thrive said it has acquired Timlin Enterprises, a provider of applications and services around the Microsoft 365 platform. Timlin brings to Thrive a delivery platform for the entire Microsoft stack including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Power BI.

Timlin, also based in Massachusetts, brings expertise in application development, customization and integration.

FOXBOROUGH, MA – October 7, 2020 – Thrive, a premier provider of NextGen Managed Services, announces today that it has acquired Timlin Enterprises, an information technology services provider and long-time collaboration partner focusing on the Microsoft 365 platform, Teams and SharePoint. This transaction is Thrive’s first non-MSP, product-capability acquisition, greatly enhancing its existing technology portfolio by adding a proven team with expertise on Microsoft tools.

Timlin, headquartered in Massachusetts, has a deep bench of engineers, consultants, and business analysts spread out geographically across the United States. The company is predominantly focused upon the Life Sciences and Biotech industries, boasting an impressive clientele list, along with additional proficiency in Banking & Financial Services.

The acquisition of Timlin significantly expands Thrive’s Microsoft Collaboration and Digital Transformation efforts to help companies unlock the hidden value they are paying for and not utilizing within the Microsoft 365 platform, increasing employee adoption and driving productivity increases. Additional benefits include enterprise-wide governance, training, management, development, support; Teams integration and collaboration; SharePoint architecture management; SQL hosting and management; Power BI and Power Platform business process automation; and other Microsoft application management.

“We’re very excited to welcome Timlin to the Thrive family and create a separate Microsoft Collaboration Unit,” said Rob Stephenson, CEO of Thrive. “Timlin’s tremendous team of expert technical and consultative employees will provide a huge benefit to Thrive’s Microsoft 365 customers, enabling them to accelerate their digital transformation efforts and enhance employee productivity.”

“Timlin has more than 10 years of experience guiding our valued clients with Microsoft platform adoption efforts, especially in the Life Sciences sector, and we’re proud to combine our highly-skilled team, tools and insights with Thrive to enhance its industry-leading NextGen Managed Services Platform,” said Ryan Thomas, CEO of Timlin Enterprises. “Our whole team is excited to embark upon this journey and spur additional growth for Thrive, as well as to allow Timlin customers access to Thrive’s Cyber Security and Public, Private & Hybrid Cloud-focused services.”

Mr. Thomas, Jeff Johnson, and Joe Piccirilli will continue to oversee the management of Timlin as the Microsoft Collaboration Division of Thrive, along with their existing employees. Timlin engaged BellMark Partners as an exclusive advisor on the deal.

The Timlin transaction is now the eighth acquisition for Thrive since the M/C Partners investment back in 2016.

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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 Timlin Enterprises

Founded in 2010, Timlin Enterprises helps clients operate as digital organizations by enabling and continuing to advance their Office 365 and SharePoint capabilities. Timlin harnesses each organization’s unique definition of digital transformation, focuses on end users as the key to adoption, leverages a proven methodology, and maintains a commitment to exceptional service delivery using only US-based resources, as proven by a 100% service retention rate.  From targeted professional services to Center of Excellence managed services they have the solutions to help organizations adopt the tools available in the Office 365 platform to keep pace with the new speed of business. For more information, visit timlinenterprises.com

About M/C Partners

Based in Boston, M/C Partners is a private equity firm focused on small and mid-sized businesses in the communications and technology services sectors. For more than three decades M/C Partners has invested $2.2 billion of capital in over 130 companies, leveraging its deep industry expertise to understand long-term secular trends and identify growth opportunities. The firm is currently investing its eighth fund, partnering with promising companies and empowering strong leaders to accelerate growth, optimize operations, and build long-term value. For more information, visit mcpartners.com

About BellMark Partners

BellMark Partners, LLC is a boutique investment banking firm providing M&A, capital raising, restructuring, and strategic advisory services to middle market companies with a particular emphasis on the Consumer, Industrial, Healthcare, and Business Services markets. Headquartered in Boston, MA with an additional office in Cleveland, OH. For more information, visit bellmarkpartners.com

Many of us have been working from home for months, and as the remote workforce is larger than ever our business and technology practices are being challenged in new ways. Remote work happens differently at each organization.  Some of us are attached to corporate VPNs daily, others who use primarily cloud based platforms may not connect to VPNs at all.  This scenario creates new challenges for managing systems and deploying policies to workstations.

Mobile Device Management (MDM) is a technology that has been in place for years allowing us to push configurations to smartphones, tablets, and similar devices ensuring compliance with corporate policy while also providing the ability to deploy apps and more.  Most of us categorize MDM as specific to mobile devices, but the inclusion of MDM protocol support in Windows 10 expands the value of Microsoft’s Intune and other third-party MDM platforms to user workstations.  Plus, it supports macOS too!  Windows 10 allows MDM to maintain system inventory data, perform remote wipes, deploy WiFi and e-mail configurations, install applications and more.  It also delivers the ability to enforce security controls such as locking the screen or encryption settings.  The capabilities of MDM in Windows 10 are evolving quickly and deliver ease of management while enhancing security posture.

As the remote workforce continues to be the norm, it is time to consider MDM as a component of your overall management strategy to ensure compliance for your mobile devices and workstations.

Interested in learning more? CONTACT US TODAY!

What does it mean exactly when a vendor stops supporting software and declares it end of life?  Effectively the vendor is telling the world to stop using that software because if it breaks they won’t fix it.  Most importantly this applies to newly discovered security vulnerabilities.  The risk created by vulnerabilities within an Operating System do not cease to exist the day the vendor stops supporting it.   What does cease to exist is the ability to mitigate those risks through vendor released patches.

Consider the Zerologon vulnerability recently discovered within Microsoft Windows Server.  If exploited this vulnerability would allow an attacker access to the highest-level privileges within an organization’s Windows infrastructure.  From there the damage an attacker can inflict is limited only by his or her imagination.  The vulnerability is serious enough that the Department of Homeland Security released a directive to take immediate and emergency action to patch servers.

Fortunately, Microsoft released a patch in August to address this vulnerability within Windows 2012, 2016 and 2019.  Unfortunately, the vulnerability exists within Windows 2008 which reached end of life on 1/14/20.  Microsoft is not releasing a Windows 2008 patch unless an organization purchases a yearly subscription for extended support.  The bad news doesn’t stop there.  The vulnerability is only truly addressed when all legacy authentication protocols within older Operating Systems are blocked.  Microsoft has stated that it will end support for these older protocols on patched systems as of February 2021.  This will effectively prevent any unpatched Operating System from interacting with patched systems.  That leaves organizations with 3 options:

1. Retire all systems running end of life Operating Systems and migrate to a modern OS or NextGen Platform
2. Purchase extended support for all end of life Operating Systems
3. Override the changes made by the patch and allow end of life Operating Systems to continue operating within the network.

Contact Thrive so we can assist your organization with option 1 (…and please don’t choose option 3).

Interested in learning more? CONTACT US TODAY!

During this year of changes and challenges, we have been forced to evaluate and pivot in almost every aspect of life.  The list is endless and includes everything from grocery shopping to education.  At the same time most of us can say our cars are parked and we are living the “work from home” life.  We’ve talked previously about the importance of maintaining a robust cyber security strategy, but as more than 60% of the US workforce is now operating from home due to COVID-19 it is important to evaluate the best approach to enable end users with scalable and supportable compute capabilities that also align with cyber security best practices.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions have seen increased use over the years but the significant capital costs associated with establishing a VDI environment, combined with additional costs to modify that environment as business and security requirements change have limited the growth of VDI infrastructure, especially with medium sized businesses.  This has opened the door for the increased use of hosted Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solutions particularly from private, multi-tenant cloud environments like ThriveCloud.

Regardless of your solution provider, DaaS solutions can be spun up quickly, are extremely scalable, integrate company security and compliance requirements, and also provide ease of access from low cost devices across just about any internet connection.  From a solution support perspective, each of your workforce members now has a similar desktop that can be easily accessed by support personnel for quick problem resolution.  Further, ease of system maintenance and application deployment are among the many advantages of DaaS solutions.

Now is the time to consider reducing costs for data center infrastructure and end user hardware while realizing workforce and support efficiencies by evaluating DaaS for your organization.  As the remote workforce continues to evolve how will you maintain position from an infrastructure and security perspective while meeting the needs of your team members?

Interested in learning more? CONTACT US TODAY!

Massachusetts (No. 6 overall) ranked No. 1 in workforce education and experience in this year’s Best States analysis. That’s important to Rob Stephenson, CEO of Thrive Networks (No. 278 on the CRN Solution Provider 500), a Foxborough, Mass.-based IT solutions and managed services provider that prides itself on what Stephenson calls the company’s “white glove service.” That requires employees who are not only proficient in engineering and technical skills, but people skills as well.

“We have some of the most talented engineers and dedicated employees in the industry,” Stephenson said. “We have a very, very strong group of individuals here.” Thrive has multiple offices in Massachusetts, offices in Manhatten, Dallas, San Francisco, Chicago, Charleston, S.C. and Columbia, Md. The company also operates a security operations center in Portland, Maine.