Platform + Community = Success for ConnectWise
Which is why the company is investing in both its Asio platform and its IT Nation community. Plus: A preview of forthcoming ConnectWise pricing options and why Security360 and Backup360 are now free.
Manny Rivelo knew that the IT Nation community was an important part of what makes ConnectWise ConnectWise when he became the company’s CEO last September. Large, engaged, and richly endowed with peer groups, educational materials, and other resources that promote sticky partner relationships, IT Nation was one of the two things (along with the company’s platform, of which more in a moment) that led him to take the job.
But there’s knowing and then there’s knowing. And Rivelo only really figured out how big an asset community is to ConnectWise and its partners at the vendor’s IT Nation Connect conference last November, when he experienced it in person for the first time. Pretty much every vendor Rivelo has worked for in the past, along with every other vendor in the industry, has what it calls a community, he explains, but what they’re really talking about is a user group in which members regard peers with suspicion if they pay attention to them at all.
“They don’t talk to each other,” Rivelo says. IT Nation Connect attendees, by contrast, speak to each other all day long every day, and every night as well right up until the hotel bar closes. Hell, there was a Category 1 hurricane underway right outside the event venue in 2022, and I can tell you personally it didn’t slow folks down a bit.
What most struck Rivelo at last year’s show, however, wasn’t how much partners were talking but what they were talking about, which is to say absolutely everything involved in running a managed services practice.
“This is a unique community,” Rivelo (pictured) said during a keynote appearance at ConnectWise’s IT Nation EMEA event this week in London. “This is a community that helps each other drive success. You tell each other your best secrets and how to increase your profitability, how you drive your revenue.”
MSPs need that kind of community support, ConnectWise believes, every bit as much as they need great solutions. “Software will give you a platform, it will put you in the race, but to win you need community,” said Dan Scott, senior director of the IT Nation community in Europe, during conference welcoming remarks Monday evening. “You need community to learn from, share with, to show you what’s possible, to hold you accountable, to benchmark against, and to see what you can achieve on your own.”
And sometimes just to survive, as Peter Kujawa will attest. Today a ConnectWise executive, Kujawa was once in charge of a struggling MSP losing $1.5 million a year on $2.2 million of revenue.
“There was a point where I was questioning if it was even mathematically possible to make money as an MSP,” Kujawa recalls. The turning point came when he joined a peer group operated by HTG and began leveraging benchmarking resources from Service Leadership, both of which had close ties to ConnectWise at the time and are part of the company now.
“Within a year we were profitable,” Kujawa says.
For someone like Rivelo, stories like that are satisfying on a personal level and immensely promising on a professional level. A community of partners who help each other prosper is a community of partners who grow faster, and partners who grow faster also spend faster on software and services.
“It’s in our best interest to make sure the MSPs thrive,” Rivelo says. “If they thrive, they end up buying more seats.”
They also reward the company that helped them thrive with their loyalty, something subscription businesses like ConnectWise especially value. “If you help a partner be more successful in their business holistically, including through peer groups, including through the IT Nation events, those partners are more likely to stick with you during tough times,” Kujawa says.
All of which is why Rivelo flew home from his first IT Nation Connect last fall more convinced than ever (much like TD SYNNEX) that technology companies need communities.
“That was when the conversation really started to pivot as to how do we invest a lot more into IT Nation to make it grander, to make it premier, to make it more amongst the people that we’re supporting,” says Sean Lardo, ConnectWise’s vice president of IT Nation communities.
Lardo, who you’ve met here before a few times, was associate evangelism director at ConnectWise until earlier this year when Rivelo promoted him into a newly created role that reports up to Kujawa, who himself was recently promoted from vice president and general manager of Service Leadership to executive vice president of Service Leadership and IT Nation. Both leaders have more money at their disposal as well as new titles.
“There’s a substantial commitment from ConnectWise and Manny specifically to provide us with the resources that we need to be able to build up and get ready for some growth,” Kujawa says, noting that he has a whole new community content team working for him and is staffing up to support an expanded collection of peer groups that already has members from some 650 MSPs.
ConnectWise lowered ticket prices for this week’s show 40%, moreover, to make attending easier, and announced that future editions of the conference will take place annually instead of every other year going forward. Same for the Australian edition of the conference.
No one shared exactly what all that will cost, but it’s safe to say it’s well into the millions. Which suggests that while Rivelo is serious about investing in platform he’s equally serious about investing in partners.
“Because our success is tied to their success,” he says.
Parsing product versus platform
Truly devoted Channelholic readers will remember the ridiculous question at the beginning of my story last June about Security360, a then brand new XDR-esque solution designed to provide a single pane of glass for all things security. Well, Security360 has now inspired another seemingly silly question: When is a product not a product?
The question is less silly than it seems because Security360 was a product as of last Friday and isn’t anymore as of this Tuesday. It’s an embedded component of ConnectWise’s Asio platform provided to users of Asio-based solutions at no extra cost. So too is Backup360, which similarly aims to provide a single pane of glass for the (lamentably) many BDR products a typical MSP juggles.
Giving both products away, for reasons I outlined in a video this week, makes perfect strategic sense in light of ConnectWise’s ambition to turn Asio into the consolidated interface for every tool MSPs use from either ConnectWise or its ecosystem partners. To the extent cost was preventing some MSPs from buying into that ambition with respect to security and backup tools, it’s not anymore.
Still, if products that MSPs pay for can become platform components they get free this easily, one wonders about the criteria ConnectWise uses to decide what’s a product and what isn’t.
Rivelo breaks it down like this: “If it’s something to do with the UX/UI making it more efficient for you to do your job, that’s probably something we won’t monetize,” he says. If it’s a solution, something like ConnectWise RMM, ConnectWise PSA, and the newly unveiled ConnectWise SaaS Security that plays a meaningful role in significant business processes, then you’ll pay to play. It took a while for ConnectWise to realize it, but Security360 and Backup360 fit more into the former category than the latter, according to EVP of product management Jeff Bishop (pictured).
“They’re good tools, but that’s what they are. They’re tools,” he says. “They augment and make the PSA, the RMM, and some of the other things better.” That’s the kind of thing an underlying infrastructure like Asio is supposed to do, and ConnectWise doesn’t expect anyone to pay for it.
For better or worse, however, the pricing picture grows a little more complicated from there. For one thing, Asio components typically offered free of charge sometimes aren’t. ConnectWise RPA, for example, is provided at no additional cost along with Asio when you use it to automate workflows involving ConnectWise products.
“When we start thinking about integrating with tons of other third-party products and everything else, there’s a lot of data traversing across networks,” Bishop says. “That starts to cost us some real money.” ConnectWise charges MSPs in that scenario to help cover those costs.
“We need to make sure that we keep the margins of the business where they need to be,” Bishop says.
Furthermore, at some point in the future there won’t really be a distinction between platform and product at ConnectWise anymore. “I don’t know how quickly it’s going to happen, but we’re not going to be sitting here having a conversation about what does your RMM do or what does your PSA do or talk to me about your documentation management tool,” Bishop says. Those will be services included with the Asio platform, which will be the principal thing ConnectWise sells.
Those new pricing schemes you’ve heard about are coming into focus
All that’s arriving much later, though. Arriving roundabout the middle of this year (instead of sometime this quarter as Rivelo suggested during IT Nation Connect last year) are new “pricing and packaging” plans tied directly to Asio. Each will feature some combination of ConnectWise solutions, but because Asio-based solutions all share the same interface, foundation services, and data lake, they’ll be more like seamlessly integrated editions of Asio than a bundle of discrete products.
Here are five more things we now know about those forthcoming pricing options:
1. Their connection to Asio is why they’re arriving in June or July rather than Q1. June or July is when a core pillar of ConnectWise’s portfolio, its PSA solution, will be pretty much entirely migrated onto Asio, and it wouldn’t make much sense to roll out a bunch of Asio subscriptions without PSA functionality.
2. They’ll be priced more consistently than ConnectWise solutions are at present. “Our MSPs go to market either on an endpoint-based or an end user-based unit of measure. We’re going to create packages that do one or the other or both,” Bishop says, noting that partners pay for ConnectWise software something like seven different ways at present ranging from per-user and per-device to per-company and per-employee.
3. They might include third-party products in addition to ConnectWise solutions. “We will look at certain things with the ISV community if they’re tightly integrated and there’s a desire for that to happen on both companies’ side, or more importantly the MSPs desire that,” Rivelo says.
4. Like Kaseya 365, Kaseya’s extremely affordable offerings for endpoint management and user security, they will cost less than what most partners are paying ConnectWise for the same functionality today. Unlike Kaseya 365 though, according to Rivelo, subscription savings won’t be the biggest reason to buy one of the plans.
“We want to tackle the total cost of ownership of your stack,” he says in words reminiscent of comments made by Syncro CEO Michael George last year. 80% of that cost is the labor required to run the stack versus licensing fees, Rivelo adds, so the productivity gains made by possible by Asio’s AI and RPA components far outweigh anything you save on subscription fees.
5. You won’t be required to buy one of them. If you want to keep buying the way you do now, you can. “I’m not going to change it,” Bishop says, except to let you pay for it all per user, per device, or maybe both for simplicity.
And now for a word from another CEO
You’ve heard from Manny Rivelo in this post, and I just name checked Michael George of Syncro too. Why not loop in Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan as well? He was our guest on the podcast I co-host this week, and had lots of interesting things to say about everything from agentic AI to bring your own vulnerable driver privilege escalations, which is exactly the kind of geeky cyber stuff I eat up insatiably. Listen in here.
Six more facts about ConnectWise worth knowing
As long as I’m throwing numbered lists at you, here are six interesting odds and ends I picked up at IT Nation EMEA this week:
1. ConnectWise expects to have its entire portfolio running 80 to 85 percent on Asio by end of year. The only partial exceptions will be the CPQ quoting system and ScreenConnect remote access offering. Bishop, without disclosing details, says he has plans in mind for enhancing those products that won’t be fully ready until 2026.
2. Agentic AI is coming to Asio, but slowly. Partners can expect autonomous functionality in areas like sales, marketing, procurement, and finance to begin rolling out as soon as the second half of this year. Agentic service delivery and security features along the lines of what Atera is finalizing, however, aren’t coming any time soon.
“I don’t imagine that a lot of MSPs would be really excited about an agent deciding when to install a patch or reboot a machine or run a script or defrag a machine or something like that,” Bishop says. “For the foreseeable future, a lot of those critical areas are still going to have some level of human needs.”
3. That new SaaS Security product ConnectWise unveiled this week is technology acquired in all but market-ready form along with SkyKick last September. “It was nearly finished,” Rivelo says. “We finished it.”
4. The reason to buy SaaS Security instead of something like Kaseya’s SaaS Alerts product, according to Rivelo, is the ConnectWise solution’s tighter integration with the Microsoft cloud. Founded by former Microsoft employees, SkyKick has “very, very deep roots into Microsoft,” Rivelo says. “We have access to APIs at Microsoft as part of that relationship that we can take advantage of.”
5. The senior leadership changes you’ve read about recently elsewhere were meant to place more responsibility—and therefore accountability—in fewer hands. “There were four [product] GMs and one engineering lead, but we’re building a platform,” notes Rivelo, who now has one product executive (David Raissipour, ConnectWise’s chief product and technology officer since November) and one platform executive (Bishop) reporting to him instead.
6. ConnectWise believes so much in communities and ecosystems that it’s building a community ecosystem. Its nucleus was visible in the IT Nation EMEA expo hall, where GTIA, Network Group, the Tech Degenerates, and The Tech Tribe, all of which are arguably rivals to IT Nation, were among the exhibitors.
“We’re welcoming all communities to be involved and engaged,” Lardo says. Even if they can’t afford to buy a booth.
“Come talk to us. We’ll figure it out,” Lardo advises. And why not? “We’re already there,” Lardo notes. “We’ve already spent the money.”
Also worth noting
You’re not the only one with product news, ConnectWise. Kaseya has updated its compliance, PSA, documentation, and pen testing solutions.
Sounds a little platform-y: SplashPoint’s remote support solution now has endpoint management, inventory reporting, and vulnerability detection.
TeamViewer’s acquisition of 1E, which we commented on in December, has begun bearing fruit in the form of integration with TeamViewer's Device Monitoring solution.
I’ve got a post about vertical AI in the works. GoTo’s new AI-powered Connect for Automotive product is a good example of why.
Speaking of AI, ServiceNow users have gained access to a lot more of it.
WatchGuard’s new FireCloud Internet Access solution is the first member of an emerging family of hybrid SASE products.
CrowdStrike has expanded its Accelerate partner program. This is one of the topics I plan to ask about in a forthcoming interview with chief business officer Daniel Bernard.
SailPoint has expanded its MSP partner program. Hoping to get a read from these folks on their post-IPO plans for MSPs generally soon.
Keeper Security has upped its partner program game too.
Forcepoint’s latest acquisition is proof that the DSPM stampede continues.
More data security momentum: Druva and Microsoft are partnering to address it.
Sherweb has added SaaS data protection services from Keepit to its marketplace.
Hey, Microsoft 365 Business Premium resellers. You can now add on the Microsoft 365 E5 Security suite if you like.