How Blue Mantis Navigates AI and Security Demand Without Enterprise Budgets – Josh Dinneen

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Dave Sobel** (0:46)
Managed service providers are being asked to do something genuinely hard, absorb AI, consolidate security, and serve mid-market clients who want enterprise-grade outcomes without enterprise-grade budgets. Today, one of the fastest-growing MSPs in North America on what security first actually means when you grow up as a reseller, and where the AI readiness conversation is really headed for the mid-market. This is the Business of Tech. I'm Dave Sobel.
Josh Dinneen, you are the CEO of Blue Mantis. Welcome to the Business of Tech.

**Josh Dinneen** (1:23)
Thanks for having me.

**Dave Sobel** (1:24)
Blue Mantis just landed number 18 on the 2026 MSP 501, and you're now serving more than 2,500 mid-market enterprise customers. But the number I was focused on is that 60% of your revenue is now recurring managed services, and you built all that while still growing the data center, hardware and software side. So I'm really dying to know, how do you manage the tension between a recurring services model and that traditional product reseller motion living inside the same company?

**Josh Dinneen** (1:55)
Yeah, so I think once again, you would mention that we service the mid-markets, and I think that's key to what we're doing as a business. So as an IT services company, hardware is a key part of that whole equation. And our business really focuses on outcomes and helping customers navigate the ever-changing landscape of emerging IT and also taking advantage of their investments already. So how do you bridge those gaps? And hardware plays a huge part of that. And we've always subscribed to the mindset that a hybrid data environment, a data center environment is the right way to go. And it certainly does serve the mid-markets well.

**Dave Sobel** (2:39)
All right. I'm dying to know which of those two motions do you think is actually harder to run well? And which of the ones do you think your people are really wired for?
Yeah.

**Josh Dinneen** (2:49)
So they're very different motions, as you know, right? So our engagement motion with our customers is assess, modernize, manage. And so when you look at how we engage with customers today, we're coming in to understand where they are in their maturity curve, where they are in their spend, and how they're trying to transform their business to meet the new demands of the modern business model. And so with that, we come in and we do a lot of advisory workshops that help our customers navigate what's next and how to get there, building roadmaps and plans to help them modernize. And then we come in and we help them do that with our professional services business. So when you look at our business, we're not just an MSP, we're not just a VAR, a value-added reseller, and we're not just a professional services organization. In fact, we're one of the largest CSPs in North America. It's part of our recurring revenue mix. And so when you look at our ability to come and service our customers, we can truly help them navigate the entire spectrum of modernizing their environments to meet the business requirements. And we do that with the lens of cyber security first and foremost, and everything we do. So being a full stack cyber shop, everything from helping customers with their strategy and posture, to aligning that to frameworks, to helping create policies right down through tool sets, right? And our ability to then manage that after it transfers to a run state or transfers to operations. So when we look at really helping our clients in the mid-market, we think of that as the entire continuum of what we need to do.
With that being said, if we were to shift this to a more transactional engagement model, that becomes challenging, because you have the quicker or easier path to revenue is typically selling hardware, and the longer sales cycles for us selling manned services, we really have a more intimate engagement with our customers. So there's a higher level of scrutiny around our ability to deliver, and certainly customers want to understand before they go all in with the manned service providers because we have the skill set, and certainly the capabilities to deliver what they need.