If you’ve seen some chatter about Gradient, or taken a look at our demo, you might still have a few questions, so let me do my best to clear them up. We’re a group of MSP and IT channel veterans who are building a data intelligence platform for the MSP industry. We’ve launched Gradient with a free data health module, but that’s just the first step. So let’s talk about why Gradient exists.
Core Values
At the core of what Gradient does is that everybody here has a strong desire to help MSPs. We term this giving MSPs vision. Voice.
Managed services is the space from which we came. For nearly 20 years, the leadership team at Gradient has worked in either an MSP or a channel vendor. Our CEO, Colin Knox, founded Passportal after running a couple of MSPs successfully. We love MSPs and the channel, and that’s why we’re here. The vision and voice we’re creating is something we believe will revolutionize the industry, and the data health module you see today is just the tip of the iceberg.
What's the Catch?
There's an adage that if it’s free, you’re the product. That’s just an adage. Here’s the real story.
Our current data health module is free, but we have other products in development that will not be free. We were building one of these other products – to be released in fall 2021 – and ran into a stumbling block when configuring and mapping PSA integrations. The problem stemmed from long lists of outdated data that was sitting in the PSA.
Gradient’s free Data Health module was developed to help resolve that problem, because we realized that dirty data wasn’t just a stumbling block for the product we’re building, but is a problem for all aspects of running an MSP. Dirty data contributes to bad decisions, wasted time, and wasted effort.
We built the data health module to solve a problem for us, but clean data benefits all MSPs, so we decided to offer this module to all MSPs. That’s where the free part comes from – it’s ready, it helps you, and it helps us introduce Gradient to the world while we build out the rest of our platform.
Data Equality
On quite a few recent webinars and podcasts, we’ve talked about the fact that we’re building the industry’s first data intelligence platform. But we’re not on a path to sell your data to the dark side. Rather, our vision is to bring about data equality for all MSPs.
Every MSP that contributes its data in a scrubbed, deidentified and anonymized manner will ultimately be able to receive back benefit from understanding things like how your peers are actually performing, what steps they’ve taken that resulted in the greatest gains, and having access to powerful information that eliminates a lot of the guessing games that come with running an MSP.
Vision and Voice
The vision part of our “why” is with the data health module, because a clean PSA helps you see your business more clearly. The voice part of our “why” pertains to the insights that will help transform the way MSPs operate, and how they make decisions. The details will be revealed in our next releases.
Fortune Business Insights projects managed services to grow at 12.2% CAGR from 2019 to 2027, doubling the size of the managed services market in the next five years, a gain of $245 billion. That’s a massive opportunity for any MSP. With data equality, it’s a massive opportunity for all MSPs. This is why Gradient exists, and data health is just the beginning.
So as we talk about Gradient's Data Health module, why not take a quick look at it. has a way of cleaning up dirty data in your PSA. You can watch a quick demo here:
While all of these are ways your decision making can go awry, you can also think of them as things that, through their elimination, will help you improve your decision making.