From The Editor
Inside Autotask Community Live! - Post Event
April 3, 2009
| Editor Gennifer Biggs is blogging from the first Autotask partner conference, Community Live! starting Sunday night, March 29. Don't miss her coverage of keynote speaker and Autotask CEO Bob Godgart, plus updates from the dozens of business success and technical tracks being offered to 300+ attendees. Gen will also be sitting down with several managed services vendors as well as Autotask partners attending the conference. Post Event: Industry Leaders Talk Shop Day 2 of the Autotask included a panel discussion among representatives from several remote monitoring and management platform vendors attending the Autotask conference: Level Platforms, N-Able, itControl Suite, Kaseya, and Autotask. Topics included SaaS, cloud computing, and best practices. Here are some sample snippets of what these industry leaders had to say: Chad Gniffke, senior product marketing manager, Kaseya, says that company has seen two things happen with its partners as the economy continues to creep along — there are hyper growth groups and there are stagnant growth groups. The difference, he says, is that the growth groups are passionate about the work they do and their business, they are finding great sales tools to use everyday in their business to find new clients, they are forward thinking, and (this one I heard a lot from top users at the conference) they are outsourcing what they don’t do well. Most often, that last point involves marketing and secondary technologies. Dan Wensley, VP of partner development, Level Platforms, says he thinks many VARs and MSPs are anxious about how quickly SaaS will hit their businesses and how much of a technology learning curve it will create. But like many past new technology offerings, there is time, he says, to figure out how SaaS will integrate into your practice and where it might benefit your customers. He does add that he doesn’t believe SaaS will ever dominate; rather, it will be part of hybrid solutions for many end users. Len DiCostanzo, senior VP of professional services and strategic accounts, Autotask, spent a lot of his time talking about best practices, and he urges solutions providers to take advantage of best practices out in the MSP space, including resources such as the books published by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Len, whose responsibilities at Autotask focus on training and education, stressed in all of his presentations that MSPs should not shy away from asking to help. With technology getting more and more complex, customers don’t have to stumble through, they should work with their vendor partners to find and use best practices. Daniel Zborovski, CTO and lead developer, itControl Suite, urged MSPs to take the information gathered by so many managed services platforms and Autotask and really exam it to see the patterns — and thus the opportunities. Derik Belair, VP of marketing and business development, N-able, told the audience he feels that the MSPs that his company sees succeeding do two things: they focus on a core competency and they become a sales organization. That means, he says, every single person in the company has sales on their agenda, from the owner to the technicians to the official sales staff. |
