ConnectWise isn’t the only company facing a future in which most of the users are agents and most of their activity happens out of human eyeshot. The same goes for every sponsor in the IT Nation Connect expo hall as well.
To a degree that surprised me at times, few of them seem worried about it.
Take BCDR vendor Slide, for example, which has been living in the headless future MCP made possible for well over a year now. “We had an MCP server when MCP had existed for like four weeks,” says Austin McChord, the company’s interim CEO, who estimates (because concrete data is unavailable) that a majority of the more than 1,000 MSPs using Slide’s software access it via MCP at least some of the time currently. Does the prospect of that percentage rising, the users becoming agents, and the customers who pay him barely knowing he’s there make him uncomfortable?
Far from it. “I love that,” McChord says. “Backup is best when forgotten. You want to just deploy it and then never have to think about it.”
Not true in other fields, though, so maybe a bad example. What about Lemhi, which you read about here in June and whose flagship solution officially went GA a few days ago? Surely a company whose goal is helping MSPs build AI service practices is leery of letting Claude get in between it and its customers, right?
“We just announced full Claude integration yesterday,” says CEO John Harden (pictured). Partly, he adds, because Claude integration was the number one request made by early adopters of Lemhi’s software and partly because Lemhi will come out strategically ahead every time a partner uses that feature.
“You integrate your workflows so deeply into an MCP that the stickiness factor is quite high,” Harden says, noting that ChatGPT integration is due by end of year.
ConnectWise, it’s worth noting, is taking a more cautious approach to headlessness than many of its expo hall occupants. The company will ship an MCP server soon, it says, but only after readying its existing infrastructure for an inevitable deluge of agentic activity.
“Our system handles about sixty billion API calls a month,” says David Raissipour, ConnectWise’s chief product and technology officer, and will receive many billions more when MCP connectivity becomes available. “So we’re busy building better, more scalable API gateways that sit in front of our servers and can handle things such as authentication and authorization for the calls that come in.”
Rivelo, for his part, sounds less than enthusiastic about the prospect of headless interaction being the only kind that matters.
“We hope that we don’t get relegated to the back seat,” he says. “Our job is to make our interface more elegant and better to use.”
Not a bad job to pursue, but maybe not the most important one either at a time when, as Syncro, Rewst, TD SYNNEX, and most if not all of the vendors at ConnectWise’s own conference will tell you, MSPs care less with each passing day about conventional interfaces.