inforcer’s Thinking AI as a Service
The Microsoft cloud management vendor has a plan for helping MSPs make their way toward the agentic AI future.
Jake Webber-Cadby, inforcer’s vice president of global sales, was still getting up to speed on AI By Design, the new strategic AI migration service from IT By Design, when we spoke on the sidelines of IT By Design’s Build IT Live conference last week, but the parallels between his employer’s thinking and the Kailas’ are striking just the same.
Both companies are pre-ChatGPT success stories working to remain relevant as AI realizes its manifest destiny to be technology’s next big thing. IT By Design’s strategy for that transition is to pivot from providing tech labor outsourcing to providing AI expertise outsourcing and executive coaching. inforcer’s plan is to turn a Microsoft 365 management platform into an enablement resource for MSPs adding “AI as a service” to their offerings.
Both companies, meanwhile, see the voyage to AI as a multi-step process that begins with MSPs readying themselves and their clients for AI’s security, governance, and data demands. AI By Design is how the Kailas plan to help with that task. An AI readiness tool currently in development is how inforcer aims to do the same. When the system reaches market within the next few months it will arm users to show clients where they deviate from best practices, and how to correct those lapses.
“A lot of SMBs don’t have the security foundations in place to be able to consume AI in a secure way,” Webber-Cadby says. Laying in those foundations, he adds, is both a necessary precondition to leveraging AI’s power and a rich source of project revenue.
Once they have the fundamentals in place, AI By Design subscribers will get tutoring on the finer points of designing and delivering agentic solutions. inforcer (in a faint echo of Pax8’s mostly forthcoming agent marketplace) will provide access to an agent library stocked by its partners.
“Ultimately, it’s going to be the MSP’s responsibility to build their IP in terms of the agents, because they’re the ones who know their customers the best,” Webber-Cadby says. “What we will do, however, is give our partners a community where they can feed off of what other MSPs are building.”
AI is a new focus for inforcer, which has attracted some 750 partners, mostly outside North America, since its founding in 2022 as a maker of multi-tenant security policy management software for the Microsoft cloud.
“Microsoft 365 isn’t built with the MSP in mind,” Webber-Cadby says. “If they’re managing a hundred end clients, they have a hundred end portals that they have to manage. With inforcer, they have to manage one portal.”
One portal that, entirely by design, does one important thing, he continues. Unlike managed software platform providers like ConnectWise, Kaseya, and N-able, inforcer’s product team thinks very deeply about one use case and one only.
“This is all we do and it’s all we’ve thought about for the past three years,” Webber-Cadby says. “If we were distracted with lots of different things going on, then I don’t think we’d be innovating at the pace that we’re innovating at the moment.”
The money the company has at its disposal hasn’t hurt either. inforcer closed a $19 million Series A round last October and a $35 million Series B round last month. Adding employees and partners in the U.S. is a priority use for that capital.