Big But Mysterious News from Syncro
At this rate, I’m going to have trouble getting top executives from managed service platform vendors to appear on my podcast.
First, I got Fred Voccola, Kaseya’s vice chairman, to speak publicly for the first time about big news months before it breaks. Twice.
Now, during a separate interview recorded earlier this week for a forthcoming episode, I coaxed intriguing hints about two separate major announcements from Syncro due later this year out of CEO Michael George (pictured).
The first won’t come as a complete surprise to Channelholic readers with photographic memories who recall my most recent Syncro writeup last August, during which George said the company has something under development designed to help MSPs provide better security with fewer tools by harnessing underleveraged capabilities in software they already own.
“If some of the more underlying technologies were structured in a way to be much more useful, then it would allow MSPs to reduce the stack and just be able to operate much more fluidly and much more efficiently within the native systems,” he said.
You can imagine that going in a number of different directions. Courtesy of this week’s interview, we now know when the world will find out which direction Syncro has chosen.
“In late April of this year, we are going public and going to market with what will be the most important security offering in the market,” George says.
That’s a big promise, especially coming from someone who said “we like to underpromise and overdeliver” of Syncro elsewhere in the interview. Here’s what we know so far about how the new offering will deliver on that promise:
1. It will combine normally distinct elements of a managed services platform. RMM, backup, and security, George notes, are three cornerstones of such platforms. “What you’ll see from us in our release and our announcement and our product release late April is going to be the convergence of those things,” he says. “It is completely unique and orthogonal to the way people have been going at this market.”
2. It will be focused on preventing attacks before they happen. That’s in keeping with a larger aim to help MSPs reduce overhead. “Once an incident happens, the economics change exponentially,” George says. “You’re in a whole different spectrum of activity where you detect, you’ve got to respond, you’ve got to isolate, you’ve got to remediate, and all the other things.”
3. The specific prevention mechanism it will lean on is risk mitigation. Because that’s one of the most important dimensions of managed services at present in George’s view. “[I] consider this a risk management market today” for MSPs, he says. “Their engagement with their customer, their end customer, has to be all about not just risk management but security risk management.”
4. It will lean heavily on AI. This too is in keeping with earlier comments from George to Channelholic about the “autonomic computing” model Syncro is pursuing, which will combine AI with predictive analytics.
“The predictive capabilities give us preventative capabilities as well,” Michael said last June.
The emphasis on AI is also consistent with George’s larger strategy to help MSPs spend less on their biggest expense: labor. At Continuum, the managed services vendor he led until its acquisition by ConnectWise in 2019, “labor arbitrage” in the form of an overseas SOC and NOC were how George delivered those savings.
“We’re applying that same strategy here—much greater tech efficiency, lower cost of operation—but doing so using technology instead of people,” he says.
So what’s the other big thing coming from Syncro?
That question is a little harder to answer specifically, but appears to have something to do with Syncro’s platform strategy.
As regular readers don’t need reminding, MSPs want and need platforms. Kaseya believes the best way to meet that need is to own, integrate, and sell all of a platform’s components itself. ConnectWise prefers to serve as the unifying foundation for an ecosystem of vendors whose products MSPs can combine as they like.
Syncro (like N-able—latest evidence here) is firmly on Team Ecosystem. So much so, in fact, that George uses the same analog I did in a recent post about ConnectWise to describe his vision for what Syncro is building. Apple’s iPhone, he notes, hides the complexity of acquiring, integrating, and using third-party software from its user.
“It’s a completely unified, an automagically unified, experience,” George says. “What Apple did to the consumer experience is what Syncro is doing to the MSP experience.”
How it plans to do that is what we’ll learn later this year. For now, the only clues George will share require a historical digression.
“For nearly 300,000 years, humankind believed that the universe revolved around the Earth,” he says. “It was a geocentric view.” Then along came Galileo’s heliocentric understanding of our place in the cosmos, in which the Earth revolves around the sun.
“I will just tell you, and no more than this, that Kaseya, ConnectWise, N-able, Ninja, all these companies are very geocentric in their view of the world,” George says, meaning everything revolves around them. Whatever Syncro is building will be a heliocentric alternative that revolves around…something else. That’s presumably the MSP, but George isn’t comfortable saying just yet. He is, however, more than comfortable once again making big promises.
“This is going to be the most transformational thing since the beginning of the managed services industry,” he says. “Stay tuned. More to come.”
It’s not just Michael George
That podcast I mentioned before features industry leaders sharing stuff available nowhere else every week. Why not make it part of your regular viewing/listening diet?