15 Hot Products And Offerings For MSPs In 2023

Attendees at the XChange March 2023 conference in Orlando, Fla. became among the first to get a look at a variety of new hardware, software, and services technologies aimed at helping solution providers, particularly MSPs, find newer ways to serve their customers.

CRN Executive Editors, Steve Burke and Jennifer Follett explore what solution providers are most focused on at XChange March 2023.

MSP Showcase In Orlando

XChange March 2023, held in Orlando, Fla., was a veritable beehive of activity as some of the top players in the IT channel, including vendors and solution providers, and MSPs in particular, got together in one of the channel’s biggest events of the year.

Attendees at XChange March 2023, hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company, had the opportunity to meet and network with their peers while learning the latest in trends in IT that will impact their businesses in 2023 and beyond, including learning from panels of their peers about issues around security stacks and about new procurement methods and hearing from the CEO of the Global Technology Distribution Council about changes in IT distribution.

In between all the networking and sessions and presentations, attendees had opportunities to take a look at some of the new hardware, software, and services vendors are bringing to help solution providers build more robust offerings for customers looking at the latest in security, communications, storage, and other technologies, as well as tools to help them better grow their businesses.

CRN has rounded up some of the offerings that grabbed reporters’ attention in Orlando.

What follows are 15 hot products and offerings for solution providers from XChange March 2023.

ConnectMeVoice VoIP Cloud Connect

Summerville, S.C.-based hosted VoIP specialist ConnectMeVoice was acquired by Montreal-based Cloudli Communications in June for its channel chops and is letting the company do what it does best under the Cloudli name.

ConnectMeVoice took to XChange to show off VoIP Cloud Connect, a package of UC features that links a mobile app with web phones and softphones to traditional physical desk phones to enable a blend of working remotely, or from the home office or branch office. The VoIP Cloud Connect app allows users to review voicemails, place outside phone calls, and make and receive text messages using the company telephone number, internal person-to-person video calls and text messages, transfer calls to fellow employees, and make three-way calls, among other features. The VoIP Cloud Connect phone app is compatible with iOS, Android, and the Chrome browser.

ConnectMeVoice, now Cloudli, is known for removing complexity around billing so that partners can be freed up to focus on margins, the company told CRN.

Bvoip Cloud UC

Bvoip spun out of an MSP in 2014 when the firm saw a gap in the market for a standardized communication offering for MSPs to automate their call flows in conjunction with their existing systems and tools.

The company’s Cloud UC offering is a channel-only solution that offers MSPs new ways to benefit from the communications market with voice services out of the box, including call attendant, voicemail, transfer/hold features and on-hold music. The platform also offers cloud contact center, web meetings, and iOS and Android mobile applications, according to the Hatfield, Pa.- based company.

The platform can integrate with a variety of existing applications and software products that partners already invest in, such as ConnectWise, Autotask, Datto, IT Glue, BrightGauge, DeskDirector and ConnectBooster.

Pia Technology

The goal of Pia Technology is to help MSPs transform their service desk and increase the efficiency of every single employee, while helping partners overcome the current talent shortage issues plaguing the IT industry, according to the New South Wales, Australia-based company.

The company highlighted its Intelligent Automation-as-a-Service platform that can integrate with existing IT service management, or ITSM, tools to simplify processes, free up resources, and improve operational efficiencies. Pia said that its platform aids in 8x faster ticket resolution, a more than 400-percent improvement in ticket closure rates, and more than 50-percent workload absorption. Those improvements, according to the company, can reduce business costs, improved service time for clients, provide more consistent service delivery, and increase employee satisfaction while freeing up the partner to focus on revenue generating activities.

Pia said that it recently closed its beta early adopter program but is now accepting expressions of interest for the next partner intake.

GlassHive

GlassHive is an all-in-one sales and marketing platform that comes with an endless library of marketing content including marketing plans, automated journeys, landing pages, flyers and infographics.

GlassHive lets MSPs see live sales and marketing data and has in-app design builders and contact management. Through a subscription-based unified WorkOS, MSPs receive email marketing, social media and sales management tools, a landing page builder and other offerings to build a full-stack solution for sales and marketing opportunities that increase revenue streams.

US Signal

Protect all IT assets with a whole suite of security offerings by US Signal. Unlike off-the-shelf security solutions, US Signal products are powered by its own secure network with PCI and HIPAA-compliant infrastructure. The product also offers a technical operations center (TOC) and a security operations center (SOC).

Through its security services, US Signal offers remote management and monitoring, web application firewall, DDoS mitigation and bot and patch management.

Through its SOC services, offerings include managed XDR, security staff augmentation, threat detection and response and managed endpoint detection and response.

US Signal also offers advisory solutions which include phishing and social engineering assessment, security architecture and implementation and policy and procedure development, among other offerings.

Vade

Vade is “elegant and simplified” email security purpose-built for MSPs. Through AI-based cybersecurity, Vade manages Microsoft 365 through threat detection and response.

Vade for 365 eliminates the bogged-down, time-consuming process many cybersecurity products require. Vade is simple to deploy and manage and only takes 10 minutes to set up.

With no-cost features including multi-tenant response, automated and assistant remediation phishing awareness training, Vade allows MSPs to build a scalable managed security service, without the hassle, all under one umbrella.

WithSecure Elements

A cloud-based, unified security platform that’s ideal for MSPs and MSSPs, WithSecure Elements brings together endpoint protection with endpoint detection response (EDR) with vulnerability management. “What’s unique there is we can discover endpoints that you didn’t know about, we can see vulnerabilities on those endpoints, and then we can initiate patching for certain applications — not just across Windows devices, but many device types,” said Andrew Neville, head of channels for the U.S. and Canada at WithSecure. “Getting those solutions to talk to each other is a massive service industry. So bringing those together under a single product disrupts that.”

Additionally, in terms of deployment, Elements only requires a single agent for all of those solutions, Neville said. “Typically you have to have multiple agents, and those agents have to play nice together on the endpoint. And even if they do play nice, typically they will take up a lot of CPU usage,” he said. With just one agent, “that makes everyone’s lives easier.”

Trend Micro XDR

At XChange March 2023, Tokyo and Jersey City, N.J.-based Trend Micro showcased its extended detection and response (XDR) platform for security operations teams and MSSPs. The platform correlates data from multiple tools and environments to help with prioritizing major threats, with data feeds coming both from native Trend Micro products and third-party tools. Trend Micro’s XDR offers threat detection across endpoints, servers and workloads, as well as email, network, cloud environments and identities. The XDR platform has also been bolstered by security operations center technology from Anlyz, which Trend Micro recently reached an agreement to acquire.

In particular, the Trend Micro XDR can be leveraged by partners whose end customers are seeking help in areas including cyber risk management, said Lamon Gorman, director of service provider channel for Trend Micro. Most likely, “partners are not going to go to their end customer and say, ‘You need an XDR solution,’” Gorman said. “Their customer may be saying, ‘How do I not become a victim on the news?’”

At XChange, a lot of the discussions Trend Micro had with partners were “around going from risk to resilience, and how you need to modify your conversation,” he said. “And then from that perspective, mapping the technologies like XDR to resilience.”

ThreatLocker Ops

Set to be available at the end of March, Ops is ThreatLocker’s first-ever capability for detection of malicious activity, such as an attempted cyberattack, in a move to help MSPs do even more to protect their end customers. The Ops tool audits endpoint data on a daily basis such as network traffic, executions and registry changes, as well as file deletions, moves and copies, ThreatLocker co-founder and CEO Danny Jenkins said during a session at XChange March 2023. This is powerful because it means ThreatLocker “can take all that data and alert you of potential bad activity happening,” he said.

Because ThreatLocker’s “application allowlisting” functionality ensures that malware cannot run in customer IT systems, the company hadn’t previously focused on detection of cyberattacks. However, ThreatLocker has recognized that even if it’s just an attempted cyberattack on an IT system, there is still value in being able to detect that activity, since it can often help an MSP to take other cyber defense measures for the customer that’s been targeted.

And while ThreatLocker has already significantly displaced the need for using endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools with application allowlisting and its other capabilities, the new Ops tool could displace even more usage of EDR by MSPs, Jenkins has said.

Buffalo: Back To Production Storage

Austin, Texas-based Buffalo Americas is best known for appliances used for data production, but at XChange 2023 showed the latest in its 7000 series of NAS appliances aimed at primary data.

Mark Green, national account manager for Buffalo, told CRN that the company’s new 12-bat TeraStation 71210RH, which was introduced early this month, is its first new NAS appliance for production data in about five years.

“Prior to this, we’ve been focused on SMBs,” Green said. “We’ve been geared more towards backup targets, cold file storage, not the production data. Now we’ve got the 71210 out with a Xeon processor and up to 64 megabytes of memory, and able to handle production data and offload it from the server. Or it can be used as a lower-cost option for storage instead of getting a new server.”

Buffalo was also showing its new TeraStation 5020 high-performance NAS appliances. Introduced in January, the 5020 takes Buffalo’s 5010 series appliance, which have been the company’s most popular storage line, to a higher level with snapshot capability and expanded memory, Green said.

Rewst Robotic Process Automation

Rewst, a Tampa, Fla.-based developer of automation software specifically for MSPs, used XChange 2023 to show off its wide range of those tools.

Will Descent (right), Rewst’s vice president of sales, said his company provides the kind of tools that MSPs have been looking for for a long time.

“Rewst actually gets all the tools to work together, and not just integrate,” Descent said. “So now that we can actually get the tools really talking and working together, we can get them to automate together. So processes that involve multiple steps and multiple tools can all be done and automated with Rewst.”

Charlie Tomeo, who in February joined Rewst as chief revenue officer, said Rewst has about 40 integrations already.

“It’s basically all of the PSAs (professional services automation platforms) that are out there, and the RMMs (remote monitoring and management platforms),” Tomeo said. “All the different tools out. Most of the tools that you could think of, cybersecurity tools like SentinelOne or CrowdStrike, or things like Pax8 or Ingram Micro. So it’s really that holistic thing of basically all the different tools that you use, or the vendors that use, you’re able to actually do integrations.”

Tomeo said new user onboarding is a good example of the integration Rewst provides.

“So if you want to set up a user in the system, how many steps does that take to make sure they have everything that enables them to do their job successfully?, he said. “You could do all that within one workflow. And at that point, nobody has to touch anything. Once that integration is done, it just goes. You could time when it’s gonna go when somebody’s come on board. And it really gives MSPs not just saving time for users, but also the ability to make sure that it’s accurate.”

D&H: MSP-friendly

D&H was at XChange 2023 to make sure MSPs know how the distributor differentiates itself, including differences in its solution set, said Earl Greer, sales director for modern infrastructure at the Harrisburg, Pa.-based company.

“I think our modern solutions take and how we approach on-prem and off-prem flexibility is different from the rest of the market,” Greer told CRN.

Greer gave as an example a solution provider calling into distribution looking for a solution for infrastructure, say some servers and storage.

“Most of our competition would say, ‘Hey, tell me what brand of server you want, and I’ll spec out some storage with it,’” he said. “For us, we ask what they’re trying to do. We have the ability to pivot and say, ‘You can do that on-prem or off-prem, depending on your cost model.’ And we don’t make him go back to another organization. It’s all seamless for them. We work on results, not just products.”

D&H’s main message to MSPs is that it cares about their business, Greer said.

“It doesn’t matter if they’re small or large,” he said. “Also, we have folks here that have been MSPs. We know what it’s like to be in their shoes. Our portal is seamless and works really well with cloud offerings and whatnot. And we’re our partners with ConnectWise and companies like that, and so are sort of a de-facto MSP distribution partner.”

## Eaton: New Lithium-ion Battery

Eaton’s new 9PX 6 kVA lithium-ion UPS builds on the company’s previous lithium-ion double-conversion products built for enterprise and light industrial and manufacturing. It offers a longer battery life of 8 to 10 years, more than double previous generations, giving solution providers the chance to create set-it-and-forget-it UPS deployments. Eaton’s 9PX 6 kVA also offers remote firmware upgrades, and the 3U size is designed for data center build outs in either on prem or collocated environments.

CyberPower

The Taiwan-based company’s award winning 3-Phase UPS products are offered through its award-winning partner program, which the company is doubling down on this year as it looks to grow share in the competitive uninterrupted power supply market against rivals.

CyberPower partners recruited for its Channel Partner Alliance gives resellers “some of the best margins in power protection,” the company told CRN.

Scale Computing

Scale Computing Fleet Manager: Zero-Touch Provisioning gives IT administrators the ability to configure clusters of edge-computing infrastructure prior to the nodes arriving on premises.

This decreases installation time by as much as 90-percent, the Indianapolis-based company said. Using the product, nodes no longer require manual initialization and can be put in place by non-IT resources.