There’s No ServiceNow for MSPs. Xurrent Aims to Close That Gap.
The IT service management newcomer is in the early stages of building an integrated, multi-function solution for MSPs that have outgrown their PSA system.
Large (and even mega) MSPs with hundreds of employees across multiple states are nothing new. It was inevitable, in retrospect, that tools designed specifically for their needs would eventually become available.
Like the one from Xurrent, for example, a name that’s probably new to most of Channelholic’s readership, mostly because it’s a Dutch company that did business under the name 4me from its founding in 2010 to last September.
“We’re kind of the best-kept secret, especially for the U.S. and the North American market, for service management platforms,” says Bryce Roberts, who became the vendor’s global vice president of marketing last month.
Roberts, unlike Xurrent, might be familiar to some of you from his time as VP of marketing first at Axcient and then at ConnectWise after Axcient’s sale to that company last September. That his new employer was looking for a new head marketer and that it chose someone from this side of the pond with deep managed services experience is no coincidence. Xurrent is in the early stages of a big push into what it feels is an underserved segment of the channel—MSPs that have outgrown their PSA platform.
Funded by PSG Equity, which made a strategic investment in Xurrent just shy of two years ago, that effort is the brainchild of CEO Kevin McGibben (pictured), another name that might ring a bell from his ten-year stint leading LogicMonitor to nearly $200 million of ARR. Much has changed for MSPs during and since that time, he notes.
“They’re getting larger, scaling, trying to become more mature, or providing managed services to the mid-market or enterprise,” McGibben says, and many need a broader set of more sophisticated services than PSA systems provide.
“That’s where Xurrent fits,” McGibben explains. “Everything to the right of observability, I like to call it, from incident management through service delivery all the way to the back office.”
Good tools exist for all of those functions, but from multiple vendors. “It’s a really fragmented industry,” McGibben says. More integrated options, like ServiceNow, aren’t optimized for MSPs. Xurrent’s mission is to close that gap.
Getting there, despite the foundation provided by 4me’s software, will take a lot of building and more than a little buying. Early acquisitions include incident management software makers StatusCast last April and Zenduty this February. More, according to McGibben, are coming. In the meantime, Xurrent is integrating the code it already owns and equipping it with an expanding set of AI features in areas like ticketing and sentiment analysis.
“When people are super irate or when their mood is changing, you can view it at the ticket level,” Roberts says. “That gives you a little bit more context as a service professional.” The system’s “workflow wizard,” he adds, generates business processes automatically based on natural language prompts.
“You just say it in plain English and it will show you the workflow that’s going to happen,” Roberts says. “It’s kind of mapping out a canvas.”
Xurrent sells both to partners and through them to corporate IT departments. “For MSPs looking to differentiate and expand margin, Xurrent becomes a high-value extension of their services portfolio,” McGibben says, adding that the system “is perfectly suited for MSPs looking to add co-managed IT projects.”
Truly scrupulous Channelholic readers may recall encountering Xurrent in last week’s post in connection with an expansion of N-able’s Technology Alliance Program. That announcement illustrates what McGibben says is the complementary rather than competitive nature of Xurrent’s current or potential relationship with leading names in managed services software despite its PSA replacement potential.
“There are a number of toolsets that those companies offer that we don’t offer and we don’t plan to offer,” says McGibben, pointing to remote monitoring and management as an especially prominent example.
For the moment, N-able is one of just two vendors Xurrent integrates with. The other (not surprisingly, given that McGibben is still on its board) is LogicMonitor. More will be arriving “in the coming quarters,” the company says, along with a lot of functionality.
“In the mid-summertime, you’re going to see some pretty big product announcements,” McGibben says, followed by big internal integration news in September. Stay tuned here for further details in the months ahead.
For your podcast listening pleasure
I can’t be certain, but McGibben may be the only interesting channel executive who has yet to appear on MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host. Don’t believe me? Check out our recent conversations with Sanjib Sahoo, president of Ingram Micro’s global platforms group, Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan, and Sophos CEO Joe Levy. Or listen to the episode that just went live today, which features an interview with Matt Lee of Pax8
