MSP 501 Profile: TPx Tells a Tale of Growth

Written by Allison Francis
August 30, 2019

MSP 501 winner TPx talks about recently being acquired, and its new, game-changing path forward.

… service provider, including the option to “bring your own bandwidth” (BYOB) for national off-net connectivity. This gives distributed organizations turnkey entry to an increasingly popular networking solution with a unique set of features.

TPx’s managed services platform, enabled by SD-WAN, starts when an easy-to-deploy, software-programmable device is plugged into any customer broadband connection to the Internet. Almost immediately, the TPx cloud pushes the exact configuration needed to fill the customer’s requirements to the device and, within minutes, the ordered services are up and running. This is a significant departure from the complex, expensive installations of hardware and cables typically needed to provision new services.

What’s particularly important with SD-WAN is that it has enabled TPx to sell other services in places and situations where it otherwise would have needed to provide a circuit to ensure quality. This has led to growth not only in SD-WAN but also in UC solutions as well.

CF: We see a lot of new, different types of competition cropping up, particularly with private equity firms snapping up MSPs left and right. What type of company do you find yourself competing with nowadays?

DJ: TPx competes more regularly with the pure-play UCaaS providers for UC and contact center solutions and regional MSPs in the market for managed IT solutions. While we may have competed with them in the past, the combination of both groups makes up the majority of our new competition and have replaced the ILECs, cablecos and CLECs of the past.

CF: Getting personal for a moment, what specific challenges have you as a business owner faced and overcome in your career?

DJ: Having been a successful regional CLEC for many years, the most challenging endeavor we’ve encountered and largely overcome has been transforming into a national managed service provider. This has forced us to rethink the entire business while continuing to growth through it all. We believe our accomplishment in this area is evident with more than 60 percent of our revenues in managed services today and the fact that almost none of our peers of the past has successfully made the transition like we have.