Inside Solarus Technologies’ Approach to Serving Nonprofits

Emerging technologies are rapidly changing the ways MSPs can provide services to their clients. We spoke with Matthew Nikravesh, the founder and CEO of New York-based Solarus Technologies, about how his team serves nonprofits and other clients.

Serving nonprofit clients as they mature in cloud and other needs

Nikravesh has worked in the MSP space his entire career, founding Solarus Technologies a little over a decade ago. Now, the firm provides a variety of managed services to clients primarily in the nonprofit space, a vertical he says the company specialized in without planning to.

Now, he prides himself on the trust his clients place in Solarus Technologies to provide the technology they need to deliver on their mission day in and day out.

“The best way I can explain it is that you know when you go home and it’s 7 PM and you want to watch the baseball game. You don’t care what your cable provider has in their IT room. All you care about is you turn on your TV and you can get your baseball game. And it’s the same with our clients,” Nikravesh said. “They don’t care what brand, what make, who we’re using on the back end, as long as we can deliver a consistent offering to them and their IT works.”

How vendor partners like Nerdio and Pia fuel Solarus Technologies’ growth

Nikravesh said the company knew it was a “little late to the game” when it came to Azure, but found itself quickly catching up during and immediately after the pandemic, as clients needed remote work support and quickly found other benefits.

With a team that hadn’t fully skilled for the needs of Azure, Nikravesh highlights his partnership with Nerdio and its management platform as a key reason why the provider was able to meet the needs of its clients.

“For the most part, all of our clients, whether they’re nonprofit or not, have some type of cloud presence, whether it’s strictly just e-mail and collaboration or if they’re going all out and doing something like Azure Virtual Desktops, it really depends on their needs,” Nikravesh said. “It was either, you know, hiring someone to be able to do this or partnering up with a firm that can give us the tools to implement these things.”

“If I had to do all this work in Microsoft, I’m going to each tenant individually or I just go to Nerdio and I say do your magic, push it out to all 100 clients and it’s done,” he continued. “So that’s the really where the magic happens in my opinion.”

In the years following the pandemic up until the present day, his clients’ needs are evolving, and so is his business. To Nikravesh, Nerdio remains a crucial part of how Solarus Technologies manages clients’ environments at scale.

“Now we’re going more from Azure Virtual Desktops to Intune and Intune Management and being able to manage those desktops independently. So it’s kind of evolved and we have a strong partnership with Nerdio that has helped us go down this entire journey,” he said.

That automation, or “middleware,” as Nikravesh calls it, is also why the provider leverages Pia’s RPA in its operations.

“Empowering our people at any level to be able to do things more on an automated basis is huge,” he said, explaining that leveraging Pia has allowed his team to create automated ticketing responses and “smart forms,” which allow clients to provide relevant information to the team in a process Nikravesh says is much smoother now than ever before.

Why AI and automation gains are crucial to scaling MSP operations moving forward

In his years of channel experience, Nikravesh says the recent innovations enabled by AI and the focus on automation are the first time he’s been able to solve common issues in repetitive tasks and communication challenges with clients. Still, he sees his commitment to clients and their needs as just as important to the work as ever.

“I didn’t see a clear path forward on solving for some of these problems just a few years ago, and now we’ve really changed how we operate,” Nikravesh said. “That’s a big push for us because it’s going to help us scale and not have to add tons of people to scale.”

“But I still don’t see AI replacing our staff, because I think there’s always a human element that’s needed in customer service,” he continued. “My customers want to talk to me. They want to see my engineers. They build a relationship with them. A lot of our customers, we know everything. We know when their birthdays are. We know when their anniversaries are because we have those relationships and AI is not going to replace that. It’s just going to help that engineer provide better service in a more efficient way.”

Nikravesh also has his mind set on the future, saying he thinks he’ll be able to accomplish building an offering he has thought about for years in which Solarus Technologies can offer a full-range of hardware and software solutions in a new way.

“So not just hardware as a service, not just software as a service, not just MSP, but a real combo of all those. And Nerdio will help us in the sense that it allows us to manage everything through a single pane of glass,” Nikravesh said. “And things like Pia and its RPA will help us in the sense that it’ll help us automate these tasks and we can just continually do it on repeat.”