‘It’s nice to see that they focus on what MSPs need. In recent years they have focused on major trends. This is a return to basics in a good way,” said Dustin Bolander, founder, partner and CIO of Clear Guidance Partners.
Jeff Bishop, Chief Product Officer of ConnectWise, said the company’s new Asio platform is poised to deliver on the vision of its entire suite of products managed through a single screen.
“Our priority is to deliver innovation, product stability, ease of use and an open ecosystem, all of which are critical to our partnership with you and to your continued success, and we know we can’t just rely on a vision,” Bishop told the newspaper. audience during a presentation at the company’s annual IT Nation 2024 show.
Dustin Bolander, founder, partner and CIO of Austin, Texas-based Clear Guidance Partners, a longtime partner of ConnectWise, said that based on what he’s seen so far, the Asio platform represents a return to form for the company is.
“It’s nice to see them focusing on what MSPs need,” says Bolander. “In recent years they have focused on major trends. This is a return to basics in a good way.”
(RELATED: ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo says Asio is ‘ready for Primetime’)
Asio is ConnectWise’s vision for a unified platform where MSPs can manage all their products and their customers’ digital estates from one place. The technologically ambitious project debuted at IT Nation 2021 and has been in development ever since.
ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo previously told CRN that getting across the finish line is a top priority for him and Thoma Bravo, ConnectWise’s private equity owner.
Rivelo said Asio has received about $70 million in investments and ConnectWise is willing to spend whatever it takes to make it a success.
“We just put PSA on the platform and we’ve had early access to that for a while,” Rivelo told the crowd of MSPs at IT Nation Wednesday, adding that of the 3,000 MSPs using the platform, 1,000 are using the newly embedded PSA to use. , which he said is still in early access while they test it.
During his presentation Bishop said the team designing Asio the ease of use of the platform by the MSP is of paramount importance.
“Asio is our purpose-built, enterprise-grade platform for the MSP community that centralizes your products and data, delivers a unified user experience, and eliminates much of the manual work you do today to onboard employees, customers and integrating disparate solutions,” Bishop said.
What’s new at Asio?
Bishop said the product within Asio has a PSA, an RMM, ConnectWise Security 360 vulnerability management, data protection, robotic process automation, dozens and hundreds of integrations, and more than 150 shared services that benefit all of these products.
Bishop said there are thousands of users worldwide and the RMM is used on 2.2 million endpoints. He also said that Asio is taking an API-first mentality in development to keep the ecosystem open and scalable for partners.
But it’s more than the products inside, Bishop said, as Asio enhances the entire MSP user experience.
“Over the past four to five months we have made many different improvements. We created custom actions, webhooks for triggers, the ability to add variables, time delays. We can integrate bots as part of the workflows,” he told the audience.
“Look, this is a huge change from last year, and I hope you get a chance to go out and test that out.”
Why this matters to MSPs
In the solution provider industry, much of the code that makes up the operational software that MSPs use to run their business is dated. In many cases it has been updated as necessary, mixed with other products through acquisitions, and repeatedly exploited and patched.
What ConnectWise is trying to do with Asio is bring all its tools together into a platform built with modern code that provides a superior experience for the MSP (all the tools to run their business in one unified place) while removing the hurdles that come with be accompanied. their older software.
“Asio is more than just a beautiful package that launches the different product lines,” says Bishop. “It’s a truly consolidated platform. It provides the experience where the products and services are designed to use the same fundamental elements, so our partners can scale and grow faster than they ever thought possible.”
What does this mean for frontline engineers?
Bisschop said Asio significantly simplifies the induction and training of new employees.
“You no longer have to map companies, locations and devices between all the different, disparate products in our portfolio,” he said.
Bishop said Asio eliminates the need to coordinate a user’s security access rights across different products.
“For many of the MSPs I speak to, that’s extremely difficult,” he says. “These products, with our new centralized service, simplify that, so you have one place to do it all.”
Bishop said Asio also serves as the hub of hyper-automation, which he said is a combination of AI and automation that ConnectWise is working to deploy across its product suite to let engineers talk to products.
“It is a next-generation AI solution that is integrated with nearly every product within our portfolio, and continues to evolve and grow as we provide access to Asio,” said Bishop.
Bots and digital agents
Bishop described how users can create and integrate robotic process automation and bots into their workflows, creating one during a live demonstration.
“All you have to do is go in and give it a name, describe it, and then you go in and add your own script to the system, and then you can save that bot, which can then go inside Sidekick be used, inside of a chatbot, in the PSA or in our workflow engine, whatever works for you and for your business processes,” he said.
In looking for ways to improve MSP profitability, Bishop said ConnectWise has focused on finding ways to automate the onboarding and offboarding of employees and prospects, as MSPs need this not only for themselves, but for their manage customers.
“We’ve started creating our own pre-built automations that give MSPs a template you can use for on-boarding, off-boarding and quite a few others that we’ll be releasing over the rest of this year. One of the big areas we’ve focused on is the onboard and off-board experience, because we know that takes up so much time for the different teams.”
Build it and share it
Bishop said within Asio, ConnectWise has its own workflow design engine that has been simplified for users and now has enhanced features, including the ability to create webhooks for triggers, the addition of time delays and the ability to add variables.
Bishop said one of the priorities within IT Nation is to share best practices, so the Asio platform will enable MSPs to share their best creations with their team or with all ConnectWise users.
“In addition to all of this, we’re also working to make sure you can start sharing what you’re building with the community, whether it’s digital workers, workflows or bots,” he said. “Our community concept now allows you to create and share it with other MSPs who are part of your family, or with the entire IT Nation community.”