Has Atera Gone Full Agentic?
A look at its autonomous AI-based IT management service suggests it has. Plus: Hints about two big forthcoming announcements from Syncro and new integration tools from TD SYNNEX.
Ask the folks at NVIDIA. Things change fast in AI.
That includes agentic AI, especially in IT management. When I last discussed that topic, one of the best-informed AI experts I know in the channel told me we could see MSPs running fully autonomous agents in production as soon as the second half of this year. That struck me as surprisingly soon at the time. Now I’m thinking it might happen even sooner.
In fact, it appears to be happening now, based on a conversation with Gil Pekelman, CEO of managed services platform vendor Atera, about Autopilot, a feature I’ve written about before designed to diagnose and resolve end user service requests without technician assistance. The company has been working on it since June of 2022, when it began investigating if GPT-3, running on a beta version of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, could do basic IT work on its own. The answer, Atera discovered, was yes.
“We were astonished,” Pekelman (pictured) recalls, noting that there wasn’t a name for what they were trying to create at the time.
“It’s natural to define it as agentic today,” he says.
But is Autopilot truly agentic or yet another example of exaggerated hype? Consider the usefully specific list of qualifying criteria given to me by a Forrester analyst for my earlier story and judge for yourself:
Can it interact with other applications? Check. Autopilot interfaces with an end user’s software more or less as readily as a person does.
Can it make and execute plans? Check. Once the system has determined what’s wrong, it plots out a complete, sequential remediation procedure.
Can it collaborate with other agents? Check. A typical user employs multiple Autopilot agents that all work together.
Can it remember what it did before, and learn from those experiences? Check and check. “It learns specifically what equipment you have, what software, what versions, what are your company’s processes, procedures, etc.,” Pekelman says, referring to end users. And it knows, based on past tickets, how that particular customer handles things like granting network access to visitors, he adds. “It sees that every time a ticket was opened and somebody asked for the guest password, it was given, and it learns.”
Last on the list but first in importance, can it do all of that fully autonomously?
Check. Autopilot doesn’t help solve problems. It does the actual solving all by its lonesome. The result, Pekelman insists, is something more akin to a “digital workforce” than a bunch of code.
“It’s like hiring four more people,” he says, except that “these four people also work 24/7 and are never sick.”
Which, for your clients, means no more waiting hours for support. “You have a problem, and it’s solved in a second,” Pekelman says, a convenience that turns agentic AI from money saver to potential money maker.
“We have MSPs that are charging extra for it,” he notes.
They’re losing fewer flesh and blood employees to burnout and job dissatisfaction too by liberating techs from what Pekelman calls the “shittiest jobs” an MSP does. “They’re free to do things that are much more valuable to the long-term health of a network or a company,” he says.
And what of hallucinations? They can happen when the tool is chatting with a client, Pekelman concedes, but not when it’s manipulating their network, because its range of action is strictly limited.
“There’s things that it does and things that it doesn’t do,” Pekelman notes. You decide which tasks fall in the former category, and teach the agent how you like them done, just as you would with a newly hired human. If the system encounters a problem it’s not specifically authorized to address in a specifically authorized way, it hands the matter over to Atera’s AI-assisted tool, Copilot, which calls in a technician—after doing most of his or her job.
“It’s as if there was a pre-technician that took the ticket before them and did all the tests they would do and all the diagnostics that they would do, and also creates recommendations on how to solve the problem,” Pekelman says.
Atera has a few dozen MSPs using Autopilot at present. “It’s in the field and it’s working,” Pekelman says, and has been for some six months. No one’s actually paying for the service currently, he adds, mostly because Atera hasn’t decided how to price it, which you may recall is a somewhat complicated problem.
That said, Pekelman expects to go from testing to full-scale commercial production within 60 days or so. “Even then, there’s going to be learning together with our community,” he says. “Everybody’s going to learn together.”
That very much includes Atera. “We learn things all the time,” Pekelman says, pointing by way of example to a recent incident in which an end user told Autopilot he needed to reschedule a meeting because an important attendee was sick.
“The reply was, ‘don’t worry, I’ll handle it, but the most important thing is the health of your colleague,’” Pekelman says. No one had taught the system compassion, he notes.
“Sometimes it surprises us.”
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?
TD SYNNEX’s Digital Bridge is ready for crossing
As I’ve recently lamented, platforms have become so important in tech today that defining the word precisely is growing difficult. Companies like Syncro and NinjaOne use it one way. Companies like Ingram Micro use it another.
TD SYNNEX doesn’t much care how you define platform, I’d say, based on a conversation this week with Nate Herz (pictured), the distributor’s SVP of business operations for North America. But like arch-rival Ingram, it cares a lot about using software to forge deeper partner relationships by making resellers, solution providers, and others more efficient.
“We have a very unique opportunity in North America with the systems architecture that we have to help to deliver cohesive experiences across what I would categorize as our traditional business,” Herz says, along with new businesses like cloud computing and smaller ones like managed print. “We’re really focused there. Where can we deliver commercial excellence, operational excellence, and enable our partners to transform using technology?”
Herz’s boss Reyna Thompson, TD SYNNEX’s North American president, has a simpler way of referring to that focus—“getting things done”—and included it among her three core themes for the year ahead during a keynote presentation last November. In pursuit of that goal, Herz, who’s arguably the tip of Thompson’s getting things done spear, is building integrations between the distributor’s backend infrastructure and the applications its partners live in all day through initiatives like Digital Bridge, which we’ve written about before.
Except that it was still mostly on the drawing board back then and began showing up in real life this week in the form of a new plugin that lets partners research products and find TD SYNNEX contacts from directly inside Microsoft Teams. Order tracking and freight estimation will arrive as well soon.
“One of the missions of Digital Bridge is to meet partners where they’re at,” Herz says, which is Teams for a lot of partners a lot of the time. “What we saw is that the easiest way to meet partners where they’re working is to start there.”
There are additional integrations in the works too with PSA systems from ConnectWise and Kaseya, ServiceNow, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, and more.
The whole thing is an interesting inversion of Ingram’s strategy, which is more aimed at attracting partners to a new, AI-powered and automated system called Xvantage than feeding data to third-party applications. The ultimate objective is pretty much the same, though.
“My hope is that it drives loyalty and drives an increase in market share to TD SYNNEX,” Herz says.
One last note about Digital Bridge
I made a point in an earlier post of emphasizing how TD SYNNEX considers partner communities and partner ecosystems closely related. Herz, for his part, made a point of underscoring the same idea when discussing how partners are contributing to Digital Bridge, and how much they appreciate the opportunity.
“They’re very excited about how we’re involving our partner community, and how we’re getting feedback, how we’re communicating with them, and taking that feedback and building it into our roadmap,” he said.
Also worth noting
The new N-able Developer Portal is designed to accelerate integrations across the vendor’s expanding ecoverse.
Gradient MSP’s new MSP Studio offers benchmarking tools for pricing, marketing toolkits, and more. Stay tuned for more on this next week.
The name you know is back: GoTo has re-rebranded as LogMeIn.
The new edition of Barracuda’s email security solution adds proactive account compromise prevention, complimentary onboarding and setup support, and more.
JumpCloud has acquired identity security and access visibility vendor Stack Identity.
Certificate lifecycle management vendor Sectigo has acquired Entrust’s public certificate business.
KnowBe4’s new Threat Labs initiative combines expert analysis and crowdsourced intel to preemptively combat the latest phishing threats.
Commvault is now leveraging real-time threat intel from CrowdStrike.
Version 7 of Compliance Scorecard’s GRC solution integrates with tools from Huntress, Liongard, NinjaOne, and others.
ServiceNow has upped its agentic AI game.
The new reporting tool from Produce8 (who you first read about here) quantifies “employee digital experience” across four key dimensions.
The winter update of Backblaze’s B2 Cloud Storage platform includes scalability, workflow, and data migration enhancements.
Verizon has a new AI network infrastructure service.