What do you get when you pair a world-class cloud migration engine with an up-and-coming business analytics platform that provides real-time metrics on systems performance and stability?

You get the powerful combination of the itopia Cielo offering and the Clarity Intelligence Platform (CIP), which together provide customers a cost-effective way to put their employee workspaces into the cloud with real-time data-driven insights on how their applications, devices and systems are performing.

“What we see with the Clarity Intelligence Platform is adding traditional analytics to data that is already being collected, and further empowering service providers to differentiate themselves in an ever evolving market,” says Scott Markley, senior vice president of sales at itopia. “This deal allows them to capture some additional revenue and provide some additional value.”

In particular, the combination gives customers data that can help them make better decisions about their technology deployments and usage for just $12 per company, per month. As for MSPs, it provides them a way to close more sales, retain more customers and provide more value to all.

“The Clarity Intelligence Platform was created to help MSPs create an ‘analytics-as-a-service’ revenue stream and provide better service to their customers,” says Jim Lippie, CEO of Clarity Intelligence Platform. “Working with itopia gives us the perfect opportunity to achieve both of these aims.”

This will be especially appealing to MSPs who cater to small-to-medium sized customers that lack the in-house talent or financial resources to take advantage of advances in business analytics. Through CIP and itopia’s extensive channel partner ecosystem, SMBs can gain access to key metrics on their own company, as well as anonymized benchmarking information on others from their region and around the country.

CIP is the brainchild of Jim Lippie, a former MSP with a long track record in the industry. He is the former president of IndependenceIT (iIT), and the former president and CEO of Thrive Networks, a Staples Company.

As for itopia, the Miami-based company is one of several taking advantage of the move from client-server based applications to cloud-based services by providing customers access to thousands of applications from virtually any smart device. With its WaaS technology, for example, an itopia MSP can leverage itopia’s migration tools and hosted workspaces and “SaaS-ify” their customers’ legacy business applications, be they developed by a third-party or custom-built, according to the company. What is more, partners can then complement these offerings with “a curated library of cloud-based software,” providing flexible and price-friendly environments to customers located virtually anywhere.

While the WaaS opportunity has been relatively modest until recently, it is expected to grow into a $4.7 billion market by 2018, according to IDC. In the past year, itopia’s business has grown appreciably. The company, which sells exclusively through channel partners, boasts customers in 35 states. And its partner base has grown to more than 150 IT service providers, according to itopia. What is more, the company’s software runs on virtually any public cloud including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, and private clouds running in customer-run data centers.