It’s All About Scale at ConnectWise
Growing as far and fast past $1 billion in revenue as possible is the common thread unifying much of what Manny Rivello has been up to since becoming the vendor’s CEO.
Time flies if you’re a ConnectWise watcher. Can it really have been nine months since Manny Rivelo stepped in as the storied vendor’s third-ever CEO?
You’ve read multiple times here since then about the investments Rivelo has made in what he considers the company’s most important assets—its platform, ecosystem, and community—as well as the pricing changes he and others have hinted at several times in recent months.
What you haven’t read here is the perhaps obvious yet still clarifying theme unifying those and other moves, mostly because it wasn’t until last month’s IT Nation Secure event in Orlando that Rivelo laid it out plainly for me. ConnectWise, we know from reporting here and elsewhere, has been somewhere in the neighborhood of a $1 billion top line for a while. Rivelo’s assignment when he joined the company was to roar past that milestone as far and fast as possible.
“That’s what our board was seeking,” he says. “How do we now scale to multiple billions of dollars over time?”
Rivelo has led and studied enough companies through the years to know that few things make realizing a goal like that harder than complexity. Big, fast-growing software makers like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and others ConnectWise models itself after make buying and deploying software very, very easy.
“You don’t scale into billions or tens of billions of dollars, or some of them hundreds of billions of dollars, without having that,” Rivelo (pictured above) says.
ConnectWise and its private equity owner, Thoma Bravo, have been aware of that fact since well before Rivelo’s arrival. Hence Asio, the next-generation application platform ConnectWise has been working on for years, and which took a significant step forward at last month’s conference with the limited initial release of a new Asio-based edition of ConnectWise PSA.
As we’ve discussed before, Asio’s designed to provide a shared, Apple-esque, platform-as-a-service foundation for software from ConnectWise and its ecosystem partners. From the get-go, however, its other, equally important mission has been to fuel product-led growth by giving MSPs a single, seamless, fully integrated place to research, test, and implement ConnectWise software.
“Ultimately, where we want to be is they can come to our website, they can look at one or more of the products, they can set up a trial, we have fully automated onboarding, and they can start to deploy,” says Jeff Bishop, executive vice president of product management for Asio and ConnectWise’s RMM and PSA solutions.
Deploy then procure, of course, which is where ConnectWise Pro, the new pricing plan we’ve known was coming in some form since last November and which we got an initial look at during IT Nation Secure, comes in. The package includes Asio-based RMM, PSA, quoting, remote access, and RPA applications, plus the security and backup dashboards ConnectWise has been including with Asio free of charge since March, with add-ons to come for security, NOC services, and more. Pricing, which ConnectWise will disclose later this month, will be both “very simple” and “very competitive,” according to Bishop.
“This is going to end up being one of those things where you buy one unit, it’s going to end up being, say, sub-$10,” he explains. “Depending on your volume, you’re going to see this thing go down to a couple of bucks per endpoint or user.”
Buyers will be free to choose between per endpoint and per user rates, but those will be the only two ways rates are calculated, versus the roughly seven in effect today. “That creates a lot of transparency for our partners,” Rivelo says. “They know what their COGs are from us and then whatever margin they place on top of that.”
There’s more coming, too. It’ll take a while, but ConnectWise will eventually boil the 47 products it has now down to eight core applications, all of which will be procurable with Pro-like simplicity.
“We’re definitely going to continue to invest in how we scale the company to make it easier to transact,” Rivelo says.
Which is to be expected, because “simplicity + scale = sales” is the unspoken equation underpinning much of what Rivelo’s done since becoming CEO and plans to do going forward. Bishop, without providing details, suggests we’ll see more of that formula come to life at ConnectWise’s next big conference this fall.
“The November IT Nation Connect is going to be a lot of fun,” he says.