GreenPages Changes Its Name To Blue Mantis, Signaling Transformation Into Digital Era Service Provider

‘GreenPages is grounded off the Yellow Pages and we are a digital transformation company—those two things are vastly different,’ says Blue Mantis President Josh Dinneen. ‘We were looking for something that could be future-proof and showed our commitment to being a modern company and evolving, which we have done unbelievably throughout the years.’

GreenPages, the 31-year-old CRN Solution Provider 500 powerhouse, has changed its name to Blue Mantis in recognition of its transformation into a digital era service provider, ready to bring customers into the future.

Blue Mantis President Josh Dinneen said the name change reflects the massive multimillion-dollar transformation that the next- generation cloud and cybersecurity services powerhouse has undergone over the past several years with new modern internal systems, leadership changes and the acquisition of multiple companies.

All the changes effectively amount to Blue Mantis “shooting out of a cannon” with the rebranding, ready to drive an expected 50 percent increase in the company’s ability to generate market-qualified leads and close to a 30 percent increase in sales-qualified leads with a new corporate website, said Dinneen. “We’re re-identifying with the market, “ he said. “We’ve been around for a long time like the mantis, which has survived and evolved over millions of years. Now we’re here poised as relevant as we have ever been—just like the mantis.”

The blue mantis—a rare subspecies of the praying mantis—moves with grace and yet is also a fierce predator, said Dinneen.

“A mantis doesn’t fly around sporadically,” he said. “It moves with a purpose. So do we. We move with grace and calmness in a crazy world. We are dealing with tech support where people’s hairs are on fire, whether there’s an outage or a potential security incident. Customers are coming to us as the subject matter experts trying to get some stability and calmness. The mantis is methodical and is a fierce predator. That is what we want to be looked at in terms of a competitive nature and also with our ability to defend against bad actors in cyber or challenging technologies. The name encompasses the character we are trying to embody as Blue Mantis.”

The name change also reflects the company’s “forward-leaning” ethos, which mirrors the new tagline, “Let’s Meet The Future,” said Dinneen. The name, in fact, comes from the Greek word mantis, literally meaning “one who divines, a seer, a prophet.”

That reflects the company’s ability to have an “eye to the future” with the ability to understand the huge technology trends reshaping the business landscape and then translating them into revenue-generating strategies for customers, said Dinneen. “We understand our customers’ business requirements and where they are going,” he said.“Our job is to be the liaison of emerging technology for customers.”

The name change is a sharp break from the original GreenPages name—a reference to the old Yellow Pages directory and the company’s roots as a catalog reseller. “GreenPages is grounded off the Yellow Pages and we are a digital transformation company— those two things are vastly different,” said Dinneen. “We were looking for something that could be future-proof and showed our commitment to being a modern company and evolving, which we have done unbelievably throughout the years.”

The name change comes with technology moving at a breakneck pace, said Dinneen. “The rate of change of technology is accelerating,” he said. “It is so insane right now. Look back just 10 years ago at how different IT environments were, how different even people thought about technology. The modern company is so different. Ten years ago most companies looked at technology as a utility. Today they are using technology to redefine themselves to increase revenue. That is the big shift and transformation most companies are trying to achieve: how to make technology become the big differentiator for them.”

That ability to make technology a big differentiator, in fact, has been a key factor in Blue Mantis’ own dramatic growth. The company has added 154 net-new customers in the past year, accounting for $30 million in sales.

That sales growth comes in the wake of a several-million-dollar investment alone over the past three years in a modern systems transformation with ServiceNow, NetSuite, Salesforce.com and Marketo marketing automation, said Dinneen.

At the same time it has invested in new systems, Blue Mantis has increased its cybersecurity staff and FinOps teams over the last two years by five times. It has also more than doubled its cloud services team over that period and grown its GitOps team—which is driving next-generation application life-cycle automation—by 10 times.

In addition, the company has moved into a new office in Portsmouth, N.H., built out a new technology innovation center in Pawtucket, R.I., and a new office in Charlestown, Mass. It has also opened a new office in India—in essence becoming an international company—to bolster its managed services practice.

If that isn’t enough, Blue Mantis earlier this year acquired Zanaris, a Toronto-based infrastructure automation, cloud and DevOps services firm, and Arcas Risk Management, a Massachusetts-based cybersecurity, risk advisory and compliance consulting services firm.

The company has also refreshed its management team, hiring channel chief titan Terry Richardson in May as its new CRO. That comes after bringing on board hot new talent, including Jay Pasteris as CISO and CIO, Steven Demaayer as chief services officer and Steve Torres as COO and CFO.

The “forward-leaning” investment has powered a three-year compound growth rate of 401 percent for cybersecurity, 62 percent for cloud subscription services and 17 percent for managed services at the company, said Dinneen. Growth, in fact, has been a “key trigger” for the name change.

“Growth is funding this rebranding and then rebranding will fund some more growth,” said Dinneen. “When we look at where we have come from and where we are going, it was an important inflection point for us.”

Dinneen said the Blue Mantis team—many of whom have been with the company for more than two decades—have embraced the new identity of the company. “The team has done an amazing job accepting the change, rallying behind it and understanding the positive benefits of what we are going to achieve by the rebranding to really drive our growth, drive our messaging, attract new talent and look and feel like a modern tech firm,” he said.

The name change also is a nod to a new era of digital managed services that is driving growth, including the triple-digit growth cybersecurity services practice and a FinOps practice that is powering 20 percent to 30 percent savings for customers and opening the door in the process for customers to “rearchitect cloud environments to take advantage of modern feature sets,” said Dinneen.

With the name change, Blue Mantis is accelerating its next-generation services offensive with a move to embrace GitOps, which takes DevOps best practices used for application development and applies them to infrastructure automation.

“We feel GitOps is the next version of managed services, looking at how do we manage the customer’s application life cycle,” said Dinneen. “Companies five years ago were lured to the public cloud believing that it would get rid of tech debt. That was a misnomer. People got there, innovated and built these applications. But the public cloud providers continued to innovate at a rapid speed, releasing features constantly. So a cloud application built five years ago can’t take advantage of the feature sets of today. So they already have tech debt. What you need to do is put those applications in a program that is continually life-cycle managing them, rearchitecting them to zero code or low code. This is about helping customers to be more proactive managing their applications as it relates to their infrastructure.”

Dinneen said he sees the name change as unleashing a tremendous wave of positive momentum. “The energy is palatapble,” he said. “All of this is going to have a significant impact on our performance.”

Blue Mantis CEO Ron Dupler, whose vision and leadership over nearly two decades has made the company a highly regarded cloud service provider, said he sees the name change setting the company up for the next 30 years of growth.

“We have never had a better team and we’ve never had a bigger opportunity,” said Dupler. “Our clients need the services that we provide today more than ever before in our long history. Technology has moved from being a business enabler to being the key business driver. Businesses today are fueled by technology. What we do is integral to our customers’ success in the digital era. This rebranding to Blue Mantis is us coming up with a brand that better identifies who we are today and who we will be in the future. This is a much different landscape and a different world than when the company was started in 1992. Blue Mantis is who we are and who we are trying to be.”