Australia - New Zealand: Managed Services Innovations Continue

How’s this for ironic: North America will host several of the world’s largest managed services conferences within the next few weeks. But some of the most interesting managed services innovations continue to occur in Australia and New Zealand. Here’s the blow by blow.

In North America, thousands — yes, thousands — of MSPs are preparing to attend N-able Partner Summit (Oct. 12-14, Scottsdale, Ariz.), Tigerpaw User Conference (Oct. 19-21, Dallas) and ConnectWise IT Nation (Nov. 9-11, Orlando, Fla.). Side note: For a list of the top 100 channel partner conferences, check this schedule from The VAR Guy.

Back to the topic at hand. I know quite a few MSPs from Australia and New Zealand plan to attend the North America conferences in the weeks ahead. The ANZ market has always been of great interest to me. Why? As Autotask CEO Mark Cattini recently told me, “Australia punches harder than its weight.” In other words, it looks like a small market, but Australia and New Zealand actually have more MSPs and managed services innovation than you might typically expect.

Among the moves worth watching:  New Zealand’s Naverisk — which develops remote management and monitoring (RMM) software — recently launched V5 of its RMM software. Naverisk claims it offers full “two way” integration with ConnectWise. Naverisk is available on premise or in the cloud as a SaaS application.

Also worth watching:  Tigerpaw is preparing to host an APAC (Australia Pacific) symposium Feb. 9-10 in Gold Coast Queensland, Australia. Tigerpaw is working with Customer Centric Solutions on the event. Tigerpaw President James Foxall is expected to be on hand for the gathering.

Most of the major PSA (professional services automation) software providers have been focusing more time on the Australia-New Zealand Market. Generally speaking, I think IT spending in ANZ is roughly one-tenth the size of the U.S. market. However, I agree with Cattini’s statement. I think MSPs in ANZ have been the most aggressive adopters of recurring revenue models in the world. My opinion is based on multiple meeting with folks like Tim Brewer, one of the top MSP minds in Australia. Plus, I learned a ton during a managed services road trip in Australia back in 2008.

I expect to see Brewer at IT Nation in a few weeks. I look forward to an update.