Meet James Ridsdale, Director and Head of Services at dataJAR

Founded in 2013, dataJAR provides elegant and powerful Apple services for business and education. Their mission is to make complex  technology as simple as possible and to equip IT teams with tools that help them manage, enable and secure their Apple devices.

Driven by their strong core values of doing the right thing, coupled with a genuine passion for Apple technology, they have built a team that they are truly proud of. The result is a constantly growing list of more than 300 customers, with in excess of 50,000 devices under management or support.

dataJAR is widely recognised as the leading technical expert in the Apple space with, by far, the highest number of international conference and community contributions among all UK specialists. Their team of experienced support specialists includes some of the most prolific contributors to the global Apple technology community, both in terms of knowledge sharing and through releasing internal support tools as open source projects.

How Did dataJAR Respond During COVID?

The past 18 months have been transformative for dataJAR. From the beginning of the pandemic, we knew our customers would look to us to enable them with the technology and support they needed to be able to overcome the challenges of remote working.

Knowing this gave us the drive to set some ambitious targets for ourselves.

We reviewed and adjusted all our partner and vendor engagement processes, ensuring we could respond to more frequent but shorter remote requests, as opposed to the longer in-person visits that were previously the norm.

For our customers, our strategy employed a two-pronged approach that focused on communication and technology.

We placed great emphasis on providing assurance to our clients by increasing our customer success and technical support touchpoints. At the same time, we stepped up our software development efforts to build and release products and tools that would enable our customers’ technology teams to be self-sufficient, from anywhere.

What Have Been Some of dataJAR’s Top Achievements in the Last Year?

This has been such an active and rewarding year for us, with multiple high points that are difficult to rank by importance.

Despite the challenges brought by the pandemic, our focus and commitment to our customers and platform has allowed us to grow the business by 40 per cent. We established a strong development team that has already released new products, while launching a new partner programme enabling some of the world’s largest channel vendors with unmatched Apple device management capabilities.

Another notable achievement for us was inclusion in the G2 Grid® for Mobile Device Management, while being awarded ‘best support’ for two consecutive quarters.

In addition to this, dataJAR won the ‘Best MSP Technical Support’ category in the European MSP Innovation Awards 2021.

What Does the Future Hold For dataJAR?

Without a doubt, the changes we have all experienced in the last year will have a long-lasting impact on the way we work and the increasingly important role of technology.

For MSPs across all verticals, this warrants a rethink of technology strategy and business models, from being reactive and transactional to data and automation driven. We believe this shift is already happening in many forward-thinking MSPs and it will become mainstream in the next five years.

From a dataJAR perspective, we want to be among the first in the sector to bridge that gap. We aim to have developed a strategy that will allow us to innovate on technology, both in what we develop in-house as well as in integrating with our partners, while also building on our core strength of technical expertise and truly understanding our customers’ needs.