Inside Autotask Community Live! 2015

By The Business Solutions Network

Autotask Community Live! officially kicked off yesterday at the gorgeous Trump National Doral Miami. Mark Cattini, president and CEO of the company took the stage in Monday's early morning keynote to update the crowded room of Autotask partners on the recent achievements and future goals of the automation company. Following are my notes from his presentation and the rest of the day:

• From a training and education perspective, Autotask has been busy. In the past year, they’ve held 200+ training Webinars, 50 on-the-road training events, and have regional user groups meeting regularly.
• In the past five years, Autotask has seen impressive growth — they’ve quadrupled in size. Cattini wants to see continued growth.
• 99.986% uptime over last six years
• The new UI is fully deployed and stands as the company’s biggest initiative. “Literally hundreds of thousands of hours spent on this,” he said. The goal was to rethink and reimagine the user engagement and the result is a product that went from being module centric to human centric. “It’s now easier to get to the power of the product,” he says. Later in the day, Cattini told me that he believes Autotask has reinvented the PSA experience.
• A year ago, Cattini believed the relationship with Vista Equity Partners would be good for Autotask. One year later, he knows it. He says that apart from the financial strength of Vista, the company has been able to impart a lot of operational discipline. Autotask management has been able to take advantage of lessons Vista has already learned.
• Cattini stressed that they didn’t buy CentraStage RMM (now Autotask Endpoint Management) to be a “me too” player. Autotask has a plan for fully integrating the two products to give users of both platforms unforeseen efficiency gains.

After Cattini, Pat Burns, VP of product management, took the stage to go more in depth on the company’s product development efforts.

• Since last year, the company has accomplished:
  • 5 new releases
  • 21 major features and improvements
  • 150 customer-driven pebbles
  • 50+ smaller design-driven usability improvements
  • 18 maintenance releases
  • 2000+ tickets deployed
  • Finished the new UI
• Burns shared some stats concerning adoption of the new UI features since launch:
  • 56,033 widgets created
  • 13,414 dashboards created (2,888 shared dashboards to more than 33,000 users)
  • Wallboards are being created, which is a digital signage-like presentation mode so companies can socialize what’s happening to the office.
• The top 3 areas of innovation at Autotask:
  • Ticket UI is being redesigned to make it more powerful and easier to use
  • Mobile experience – Autotask isn’t just porting their system to mobile. The entire mobile experience is being designed from the ground up to ensure users can get the most power.
  • A new client portal is being designed to create a customer experience so compelling it makes MSPs even more indispensable

Additional notes from the day:

• Christian Nagele, GM, RMM global sales and Ian van Reenen, GM, RMM product and engineering for Autotask Endpoint Management explained to me that the integration with Autotask goes way beyond typical integrations between PSA and RMM products. They believe the integration will give MSPs new insights into their customers to deliver better service and address previously unidentified inefficiencies in their operations.
• There’s a new RMM player in the market — NinjaRMM. I stopped by their booth and learned that the company has a handful of execs from Dell, Quest Software, PacketTrap, and SonicWALL. The company will be ramping up over the next few months. Stay tuned...
• I spoke to a handful of MSPs who shared stories of how they’re great at IT, but weakest in running their business efficiently. Tools like Autotask enforce a system that ensures time is tracked, projects are properly managed, tickets are handled, and customers are satisfied. If you aren’t yet using an automation tool, your business is probably suffering for it.