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ConnectWise Invests in BizDox: IT Nation Keynote Recap
ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini unveiled the company's next strategic investment at IT Nation 2013. Here's a live keynote recap.
4 Min Read
ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini.
ConnectWise has invested in BizDox, a visual documentation company that intends to disrupt Microsoft (MSFT) Visio and others. CEO Arnie Bellini shared the news and described next moves to 2,400 attendees at IT Nation 2013. Here’s a recap.
The biggest themes:
Helping partners to document and leverage best practices.
ConnectWise user interface and mobile enhancements entering testing now or soon.
ConnectWise cloud gaining increased redundancy.
A major shift to user-based billing and pricing coming in late 2014.
Now, the minute by minute update…
ConnectWise’s mission is partner success.
A pyramid model that builds toward success includes brst practices, expert system software, support, education. consulting and community.
“I don’t consider us a software company. We’re a skills-building company for partners”
“My vocation is to try to make your dreams come true.”
Bigger picture: Bellini is recounting his life-long dream to swim the English Channel. He failed on his first attempt two years ago. And was crushed.
During IT Nation last year, Jim Collins told him to work smarter not harder on the journey.
Bellini pursued best practices to find success in his swim, interviewing experts about how to stay completely focused for the 16-hour swim.
“I had to overcome my doubts, fears and insecurities. Every stroke, your brain is telling you ‘get out of the water; what are you doing here?”
The swim allowed him to face fears and insecurities.
You need encouragement to succeed — which is now the key theme of his keynote.
Success is Not a Straight Line
Bellini talks about course corrections and the 20 Mile March theme from last year’s keynote.
He’s shifting the keynote to best practices — across marketing, sales and more.
ConnectWise has identified more than 200 KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that will be available through ConnectWise Dashboards. They will be available in Q1 2014.
ConnectWise is adding a report writer — “because we heard you.” Bellini conceded that the report writer should have arrived sooner. Watch for it in Q1 2014.
More updates coming.
How ConnectWise Can Help MSPs With Growth
It’s not just about integration across ConnectWise, LabTech and Quosal. It’s about innovation.
It sounds like ConnectWise will share details about a new software development kit and APIs at the conference. The message: We’ll continue to integrate with third parties.
Bellini demonstrated minor and major user interface changes. It sounds like they’ll roll out in 2014. “It’s browser based, finger friendly and, we think, pretty awesome.”
“Yes we’re going to the browser.”
But the ConnectWise client is also being overhauled to consume one-fifth of the memory it currently requires. It will be in beta in December.
The current 32-bit client is limited to four tabs but ConnectWise will remove that limit in the December beta.
Mobile: Bellini showed of a sales dashboard app running on his iPhone. “It’s incredibly useful for sales people in the field.” My spin: ConnectWise vs. Salesforce.com in the mobile market.
ConnectWise Cloud
70 percent of new partners are going cloud.
Delivering 9.9999% uptime. Redundancy on Europe and Australia. That redundancy is coming to North America at the end of this year. It’s a hot, redundant cloud, he asserted.
Side note: ConnectWise has six attendees at Amazon AWS re:Invent 2013 conference this week in Las Vegas.
Other Updates
Watch for Partner Kits http://www.connectwise.com/partnerkits to help drive business.
ConnectWise continues to promote consulting and certifications that blanket third-party hardware, software and services.
ConnectWise is packaging its APIs into a software development kit — to deliver more integrations in less time. “We’ve made it simple.”
ConnectWise is seeing a shift to user-centric management where the users are talking to cloud applications. Billing by user and deploying by user — the goal is to deliver that by Q3 2014.
Modern Office Communiucator: What if you could communicate with every customer or user within your customers base? It’s coming…
The Investment
ConnectWise’s latest investment is BizDox, a visual documentation company.
Bellini did not hype the deal. Instead, he positioned it as a sales tool that nicely tucks into the Modern Office Suite for total business management.
For complete IT Nation 2013 coverage, check out www.MSPmentor.net/ITNation2013.
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