ConnectWise Aims for the Best of Both Worlds
Note: ConnectWise’s IT Nation Connect event started Wednesday and is still technically underway as I write this on way home to Seattle, which is why this week’s post is arriving much later than usual. Apologies for the delay, but here’s hoping it proves worth the wait.
Let me break the suspense. If you’re wondering how ConnectWise has changed its pricing in response to the super low rates Kaseya is charging buyers of its two Kaseya 365 solutions, the answer is it hasn’t.
Yet.
“We will be announcing, in Q1, strategies around pricing,” said Manny Rivelo, ConnectWise’s CEO since September, during a press conference earlier today at the vendor’s 2024 IT Nation Connect event in Orlando.
So if not new pricing, what did ConnectWise talk to partners about at the show? Well, for the second time in as many weeks, I’m currently flying home from a major conference slightly surprised by the answer.
Last week, the conference was DattoCon, where Kaseya, which has long emphasized the bottom-line benefits of tightly integrated platforms, talked more than usual about hyperautomation. This week, it’s IT Nation Connect, where ConnectWise, which has been foregrounding its hyperautomation strategy much of the last year, had more than usual to say about the bottom-line benefits of tightly integrated platforms.
But with one crucial difference from how Kaseya, which believes fervently in owning and delivering the entire platform itself, thinks about the topic. “A platform is not a platform,” said Rivelo (pictured) during a Wednesday evening keynote, “unless it has an open ecosystem.”
It’s a message Rivelo badly wanted MSPs to hear, badly enough that by my count he used the word “platform” 35 times in a little under 25 minutes of speaking time, and “ecosystem” another eight. Platforms are worth that kind of attention, he made clear, because MSPs without one will struggle to turn a profit.
“You have 20 to 40 different technology stacks that you integrate as best as you can, and you use human middleware—people—to do a lot of that integration,” Rivelo said during his keynote. “It’s inefficient. It’s costly. And guess what? It’s only going to get more complex, because the technology continues to come and it’s coming in at an ever-increasing pace.”
A platform, and more specifically Asio, the next-generation platform ConnectWise unveiled in 2021, does that integration for you behind a single interface with a shared design framework that turns the vendor’s RMM and PSA solutions in particular into something akin to peanut butter and jelly, according to Jake Varghese, executive vice president and general manager of ConnectWise’s business management unit.
“They go extremely well together,” he says. “Layer on some security and some data protection, and it’s magic.”
So far, I think, you’ll get no argument from Kaseya. The all-important difference between its take on platforms and ConnectWise’s is that ConnectWise thinks it’s found a way to bring the seemingly contrary forces of platform uniformity and ecosystem diversity into a finely balanced harmony, and to give its partners the best of both worlds in the process.
ConnectWise, which believes it’s still a couple of years away from pulling that off across the entire Asio platform, says it’s realizing that vision today in Security360, the “stealth XDR” (ConnectWise prefers attack surface management) solution the company introduced in June. MSPs like the flexibility to pick and choose security solutions from multiple suppliers, says Ameer Karim, ConnectWise’s executive vice president and general manager of cybersecurity, but hate the extra work that imposes.
“You have to go into the SentinelOne console, you’ve got to go into the Bitdefender console, you’ve got to go into the Webroot console,” Karim notes. That’s three different interfaces, three different passwords, and three different agents to deploy. Security360 conceals all that behind a single UI, allowing MSPs to enjoy freedom of choice in the software they use without suffering the productivity-sapping (and pervasive, per new data from Guardz) effects of “tool sprawl”.
“That will drive efficiency at the MSP level and will allow them to focus on getting new business and delivering better customer service,” Karim says.
According to ConnectWise, though, Security360 does more than mitigate the downsides of multi-vendor tool stacks. It also helps MSPs collect the upsides. Multi-vendor tool stacks, the company believes, outperform single-vendor ones.
“It’s very hard for one entity to be best of breed at everything,” Varghese says. “The richer, the more vibrant, and the more robust the ecosystem offering is, the better it is for any MSP.”
Nick Heddy, president and chief commerce officer of Pax8, agrees. MSPs who get everything they use from one source miss out on interesting, more effective solutions from newcomers to the market.
“That’s the problem with the closed ecosystem,” he says. “It doesn’t allow for that innovation to happen.”
A win for everyone
If vendors are leery about being hidden from view behind a ConnectWise interface, they’re not yet showing it much. Pax8, in fact, has a new agreement in place to embed the marketplace it’s spent years of effort and untold millions on in Security360 by as soon as Q1 of next year, so that users who spot a gap in a client’s defenses can fill it immediately.
“We want it to be as easy as possible to consume that product at that moment,” Heddy says.
Malwarebytes, which completed its Asio integration in April and is now actively embedding its software in Security360, is all-in too.
“There’s still a road to go down, but I love the concept and I love the thought process behind what they’re doing,” says Brian Kane (pictured), the vendor’s senior director of global channel and alliances. “I think it’s a win for everyone.”
Others do too. Security360 has eight integration partners (including Acronis, Bitdefender, Microsoft, Proofpoint, and SentinelOne) today and will have 15 (including CrowdStrike, ESET, Huntress, and Sophos) by the end of the year.
Security360’s data protection sibling Backup360, which reached market this week, is on a similar arc. In addition to Axcient and SkyKick, which ConnectWise bought in September, the new system integrates at launch with software from Acronis, Veeam, and…Datto.
Yes, that’s right. ConnectWise’s commitment to ecosystem is so strong that one of the first vendors it pulled into the BDR portion of its Asio ecosystem was Kaseya.
The Apple experience
Rivelo said something during that press conference today while trying to explain the vision behind ConnectWise’s platform + ecosystem strategy that grabbed my attention.
“The easiest way to think about it is almost like the iPhone,” he said, holding his own up to underscore the point. “The iPhone is a tool for the consumer loaded with applications that you consume, and you pick the applications you want.” Asio works pretty much the same way.
It’s a good analogy, but the reason it caught my ear was because Varghese had used it too just the day before to illustrate why ConnectWise believes working in Asio must be a “delightful experience.”
“Look at the beautiful phone that you’re operating,” he said, gesturing toward the iPhone I was using to record our conversation. “That’s a beautiful experience, and your expectation [for technology] is set from that.”
Hear something like that twice in two days and you can’t help but wonder: Did ConnectWise consciously model its platform and ecosystem after the iOS platform and ecosystem?
Nope. “We’ve taken inspiration from a lot of great companies,” says Jeff Bishop, executive vice president and general manager of unified monitoring and management at ConnectWise, citing HubSpot, Microsoft, Salesforce, and ServiceNow as examples. Varghese, for his part, said he would have made the same comparison if I’d been holding a Pixel.
Still, I wonder. Might Apple rather than Microsoft be the IT industry legend that ConnectWise most resembles? Consider:
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The iPhone is a seamless integrated platform. And that’s because Apple controls all of it, especially iOS. Asio, by extension, is the iOS of managed services platforms, according to Karim. “It’s the MSP operating system,” he says. “Everything plugs into it.”
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The iPhone hides complexity from the user. And so does Asio, notes Karim (pictured), adding that there’s nothing easy about getting four solutions from as many vendors to behave like one solution called Security360. “There’s a lot of real hard work that’s happening behind the scenes,” Karim says, and it’s all invisible to anyone using the system.
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People love the iPhone because they love using the iPhone. And they love using the iPhone because Apple cares about design. So does ConnectWise, according to Varghese, who says an interface designer works side by side with an engineer and product manager on every Asio addition. “Designing the experience is what we lead with,” Varghese says. “That’s the first thing that anyone sees.”
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The iPhone without the App Store is just a phone. “That phone comes to life because of that open ecosystem,” Karim observes. The same logic applies to Asio’s ecosystem marketplace, which ConnectWise originally planned to call an App Store until visions of depositions and legal bills scared it away.
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No one cares that the iPhone costs more than its competitors. “People pay a premium because they want to have a seamless experience,” Karim says. “We live and die on these things now.” MSPs, similarly, live and die on their RMM and PSA. ConnectWise thinks few will settle for solutions they like less to save a few dollars.
For your weekend listening pleasure
In addition to its marketplace pact with ConnectWise, Pax8 announced a new partner program this week. I offered some thoughts on its significance on Monday and some more on the podcast I co-host in a new episode out today.
How the new guy did
I like to sit as close to front and center as I can at events like IT Nation Connect, mostly so I can take pictures. That’s where I was Wednesday in the minutes before the general session got underway when Jason Magee strolled by to say hello to a few of us.
He looked, to my eyes, appropriately relaxed for a man on the verge of enjoying two months of well-earned rest and relaxation in Napa and Europe before doing…something. I can’t tell you what because he didn’t tell me, but he appears to have a plan for the next stage of his career that I’m guessing we’ll all hear about some time in the spring or summer.
In any event, at some point during the pre-event chit chat I realized that one of the voices I was hearing behind me belonged to Mike Hoffman, the ConnectWise board member I’ve spoken with a couple of times. Hoffman, in turn, mentioned that most of his boardroom peers were seated nearby too.
Which is to say that when Rivelo took the stage for the first time at an IT Nation Connect show, assuming anything was visible through the lights, he saw the board that hired him, a cluster of reporters, and a few thousand partners staring back at him and hanging intently on his every word.
And that, by the way, was just after Magee (pictured) concluded what’s probably his last onstage appearance at an IT Nation event by sharing (in jest, let’s be clear) a censored version of the advice his predecessor, ConnectWise founder Arnie Bellini, gave him during the last leadership change in 2019.
“Manny, you’re taking on an incredible opportunity and community here,” he said. “Don’t bleep it up.”
If any of that made Rivelo nervous, he didn’t show it. I was curious to know what kind of impression he made on the partners in the room, though, so I asked a few. As you’ll see, the gist of what I heard back, was mostly (though not entirely) “we’re hoping, we’re waiting, and we’ll see.”
“I’m a big fan of Jason Magee and I think he did a fantastic job moving ConnectWise forward building on the legacy of Arnie and keeping connected to the community. In this new phase, I see that Manny has the opportunity to bring ConnectWise to the position of being a true platform for the industry with Asio, and that could be a big future.”
—Ann Westerheim, president, Ekaru LLC
“Given Manny Rivelo’s leadership history in the tech industry, I am excited to see how he leverages that knowledge and drives ConnectWise into 2025 and beyond.
—Lisa Shorr, co-owner, Secure Future Tech Solutions, brand strategist, and chief brand strategist, Channel Mastered
“It was really hard to form an opinion other than he appears to be no nonsense.”
—Ed Correia, CEO, Sagacent Technologies
“I loved his vibe. He led with gratitude for his team, and the entire MSP community. I’m really excited about ConnectWise’s renewed focus on community and desire to be a force for good.”
—Reagan Roney, chief experience officer and principal, Solvere One
Also worth noting
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It’s a measure of how big a week this was that I couldn’t find time to report on the fact that Thoma Bravo and H.I.G. Capital now own CompTIA’s certification business.
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Monica is a new “hyper-contextual” AI assistant from SuperOps designed to provide personalized, profit-boosting insights and answers.
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The new MSPLiftOff Program from SuperOps is a growth enablement program for MSPs.
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Just in time for IT Nation Connect! EasyDMARC’s email security solution is now part of the ConnectWise marketplace.
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With SaaS Alerts off the market, CrowdStrike has acquired SaaS security vendor Adaptive Shield instead.
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It’s also launched a new red team vulnerability assessment service for AI systems
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FortiAI for FortiNDR Cloud and FortiAI for Lacework FortiCNAPP are the latest additions to Fortinet’s FortiAI generative AI family.
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SonicWall’s TZ80 is a subscription-priced firewall platform for branch offices, small offices, and home offices.
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CloudBolt and CloudEagle.ai are joining forces to simplify cloud management and FinOps.
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Addigy users can now deploy hundreds of CMMC and DISA STIG benchmarks with a single click to iOS and MacOS devices.
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Atakama has added advanced DNS capabilities to its browser security platform.
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AVANT has updated its Pathfinder sales platform.
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Sherweb has added Keeper Security, Check Point with Avanan and Perimeter81, KeepIT, Wasabi, USecure and HacWare to its line card.
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Moovila and MSP+ are teaming up to educate MSPs on project management, a topic they could stand to understand better.
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Joe Alapat is now chief strategy officer and Callen Sapien is the new chief product officer at Liongard.
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Tanuj Raja is the new SVP of North America hyperscaler and marketplace at TD SYNNEX.
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Kelly Wells is the new COO at Object First.