FEBRUARY 20, 2025: Backed by Chris Marshall and headed by Pat Devlin, ITAaaS will be independent.
blueAPACHE has spun out consultancy firm IT Architect as a Service (ITAaaS) to meet the growing need of customer demand for strategic vendor agnostic advice around architecture and IT decisions.
ITAaaS will be headed by Pat Devlin, in the role of managing partner, and backed by blueAPACHE managing director Chris Marshall. Both will serve as company directors for the consultancy firm.
The idea for ITAaaS was driven by the growing need for information around how artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and cyber security are transforming business operations.
“ITAaaS was launched to address this challenge,” said Devlin. “Organisations need strategic guidance to balance risk, cost and technical debt.”
In an interview with ARN, Marshall and Devlin said ITAaaS was started in July 2024 to drive consultancy and advisory services and is in a “really exciting start-up” phase and is “really starting to gain momentum”.
They said the business provides independent digital business architecture services and works in partnership with blueAPACHE.
According to Marshall, the pair took a pragmatic view on whether consulting and advisory services should be embedded inside an existing organisation or operate independently.
“Independence brings a lot of value, especially when assessing things like hybrid continuity and data resilience,” he said.
By keeping advisory and consulting as a separate business unit, ITAaaS ensures that it provides agnostic advice for the best outcomes, Marshall explained.
“We focus purely on architecture, helping businesses make informed technology decisions without vendor bias,” said Devlin. “By leveraging blueAPACHE’s resources while maintaining operational independence, we provide strategic insights while allowing customers to retain full control over their IT investments.”
However, the separation between the two organisations was vital for both Marshall and Devlin, with both reiterating that most of ITAaaS’ clients weren’t blueAPACHE’s customers and wasn’t built specifically for them.
“It’s really challenging to give true independent advice when the main cost of an organisation is service delivery,” said Marshall. “blueAPACHE is a highly regarded managed services provider [MSP], but when you’re delivering services, it’s much harder to step back and give objective advice, especially if that advice means rebalancing workloads from an MSP environment to the hyperscale cloud.”
“I think there’s definitely an opportunity for true independence,” said Devlin. “There’s a bit of backlash against some of the much larger consulting firms. They do amazing work, but some have received negative press regarding structure and conflicts of interest.”
Perfect IT storm
Devlin said ITAaaS’ goal is to help businesses make the right choices, whether that means sticking with VMware, moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS), or finding another hybrid solution.
“If you ask a Microsoft partner about resilience, their solution will be Microsoft-based, and if you ask AWS, it’ll be AWS-focused. True resilience means considering hybrid options,” he said.
Marshall continued, saying that the projects ITAaaS is looking at have shifted from exploratory, uncertain inquiries to larger, strategic needs
“There’s lots of architectural advice available, but when you pull the threads, you almost always end up with some kind of vendor sponsorship,” he said.
“Someone will say, ‘Hey I can give you great advice on the best hybrid cloud solution’, but underneath that, there’s someone selling storage or hyperscale services. It’s hard to view that as independent because, at its core, it’s not.”
This increase in demand for this type of advice was a signal from the market that there was a need for more boutique, specialist advisory services and fewer layers of bureaucracy.
“We’re seeing the same thing with virtualisation,” Devlin said. “There’s a storm around VMware changes, with many people trashing them and saying it’s all going to hell.
“But there’s a risk in making rash decisions, waking up one morning and deciding to move everything to an open-source solution like Proxmox. People bought VMware for a reason … it might be more expensive, but blindly switching might not be the right move.”
According to Devlin it was this “perfect storm at the moment”, with a definite need and shift towards smaller specialist advice, that was behind ITAaaS’ inception.
“A storm of changes is happening in our industry and it’s hard to have a conversation without mentioning those two magical letters — AI,” he said. “It’s disrupting everything and moving so fast that it’s risky. I often compare it to the early days of storage technology.
“There’s a real risk of paying a million dollars for something that, in six months, will be worth only $200,000.”
AI is exposing that kind of risk and without the right advice on invest, the wrong product at the wrong time, which could create a situation where a customer wakes up the next day and find themselves outpaced by the market.
“This is why people are seeking help,” said Devlin. “One of the biggest shifts we’re seeing is from old-school RPA [robotic process automation] to new AI-driven process automation.
“If you look at the old RPA vendors, they’re like the uncles of AI, but their business models are being disrupted. What once cost a million dollars can now be done with Microsoft Power’s low-code, no-code solutions for $50,000.”
Avoiding cost overruns
Marshall and Devlin are excited about the prospect of being able to provide unbiased advice through ITAaaS, as well as helping customers to avoid cost overruns before they start seeking advice.
Businesses want independent advisory services to make the right technology investment decisions from the outset. However, Devlin said many clients think “consulting” is an expensive luxury, but when done properly, it can save massive amounts of time and money by preventing missteps.
“We helped a small software startup that was about to spend hundreds of thousands on an AI platform to automate service delivery,” said Devlin. “Before investing that kind of money, they spent $15,000 with us for discovery and realised their plan wouldn’t work.”
Not every customer ITAaaS works with are in technology, but they are all looking for access to specialists whose sole specialty is just keeping up to date with the technology industry’s innovation.
“The advantage of the consultants we’ve got in our architecture team is they spend their lives basically popping in and out of vendor updates and training, being the most up-to-date guys on product,” explained Devlin. “When Microsoft does something crazy with their new intra platform and creates a new level of automation, they’re right on top of that and thinking about ways to translate that into useful projects for the customers we deal with.”
Marshall explained this is why there’s value in having people who are in the know and following systems updates and keeping on top of AI innovations.
Moving forward with ITAaaS
As ITAaaS continues to gain momentum, Devlin said there are big tenders popping up, particularly around data governance and security.
“The new SOCI [Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018] legislation has companies wanting security audits to assess whether their operational technology, is capable of running modern security,” he said. “Many old SCADA [supervisory control and data acquisition] systems from the 1980s simply can’t.
“With this new Act, non-compliance could be costly, so companies need independent guidance to understand their risks.”
Devlin will be taking a much more “active role” with market pick-up, which will make ITAaaS a team of “four customer-facing folks”, plus the bigger system of blueApache to draw on.
For blueAPACHE, it will business as usual, with Devlin driving the ITAaaS business unit. The key will be to focus on driving results, Marshall explained.
“The shift in the market, particularly led by government, away from big consulting agencies, that’s opened the door for us to have a really meaningful role,” said Devlin. “We’re looking at growth opportunities and if we win the entire book of work in front of us, we’re going to need more support. But that’s a wonderful problem to have.”
Additional information: