ConnectWise To Bring Four Technologies Together On Single Platform

ConnectWise plans to bring LabTech, Quosal and ScreenConnect technologies onto a single user interface to minimize hassle and save partners time and money.

"We want to blur the lines between a PSA [professional services automation] solution and remote monitoring, remote connect and quote and proposal," said Arnie Bellini, ConnectWise co-founder and CEO, during a keynote address Thursday at the company's IT Nation 2015 event. "We can really help give you more power by bringing all of them together as one united team."

Bellini told the more than 3,000 MSPs in attendance at IT Nation 2015 in Orlando, Fla., that ConnectWise has fully brought together the support, education and consulting teams from the four companies -- the three acquisitions and ConnectWise -- to ensure they operate in the same way and bring the same culture and passion to the table. This will enable partners to have all of their needs addressed in a single place, Bellini said.

[RELATED: ConnectWise: An MSP for MSPs]

ConnectWise has also overhauled its organizational chart, Bellini said, to fully take advantage of the best products and practices from each vendor and make the experience more seamless for customers.

"Today, we have all four of these companies merged into one company," Bellini said at the Hyatt Regency Orlando. "We were engaged, but now we're actually married."

As part of the reorganization, Bellini said he has also taken on the role of chief product officer to help fully unite all of these products and drive new, meaningful synergies. The founders of LabTech, Quosal and ScreenConnect will all retain leadership roles in ConnectWise, Bellini said.

PSA vendor ConnectWise invested in remote monitoring and management (RMM) vendor LabTech in 2010 and quoting and proposal vendor Quosal in 2011, and acquired remote connect vendor ScreenConnect in 2015.

"We took advantage of all these technology trends as they were happening," Bellini said.

And, for the first time, the offerings from all four companies will be accessible from one source: the ConnectWise Business Suite. This will facilitate widespread software innovation beginning with ConnectWise 2016.1, and eventually allow partners to access offerings from all four vendors with a single user interface.

Bellini cautioned that it will take ConnectWise a little time to get all the vendors onto a single user interface, but noted the company is already busy working on it.

Having a single account manager and platform for accessing PSA, RMM and quoting capabilities will be a major time- and hassle-saver, according to Matt Dryfhout, CEO of Langley, B.C.-based Scout Technology Guides.

"I do think there's strength gained by having the various pieces under one brand," Dryfhout said. "This is Bellini's dream coming together, because ConnectWise is building its own ecosystem now."

Dryfhout is also pleased with ConnectWise's acquisition of ScreenConnect, saying it will provide Scout Technology with the top-of-the-line remote connect solution at no additional cost.

For its part, Compu-Gen Technologies previously had to build all of its LabTech functions separately, jumping onto the RMM platform to work on coding before updating the ticket status on ConnectWise, according to Bob Cleary, a network consultant for the Williamsport, Pa.-based company.

But thanks to the ConnectWise's focus on synchronization and centralizing usage, Cleary said he will no longer have to do that. Going forward, Cleary said Compu-Gen expects it will be able to both accept and update tickets as well as write code directly through the ConnectWise portal.

PUBLISHED NOV. 12, 2015