ConnectWise IT Nation Connect Partner Reviews a Mixed Bag
We got the pros and cons straight from the MSP community attending the event.
November 16, 2021
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“We are a long-term ConnectWise partner (going back to 1994). I thought the conference overall was great. I received tons of value from being able to connect with vendors and other MSPs. It is a great way to quickly get a pulse on the overall MSP market.
“We love ConnectWise and remain a committed long term client. But, in terms of ConnectWise’s own announcements in the opening night keynote on Wednesday, I was not very impressed. There really wasn’t much offered in terms of details about the timeline for the Asio rollouts, migrations from legacy products, innovations for new solutions (i.e., automated workflows, etc.). It felt like they have had a lot of internal issues trying to integrate ConnectWise and Continuum and that they were trying to assure us as an audience that they are past those issues and listening to us as customers again.”
“Connectwise, Datto and Kasaya have been on a mission to improve visibility into MSP client environments and shoring up the MSP community’s tools to manage environments at scale. It is very promising to see Connectwise delivering on some of these needs and improving its platform.
“It is a good thing for MSPs, and a great thing for the customers MSPs support. Further, it’s a good step in the right direction, putting some enterprise-grade capabilities in the hands of MSPs to better support their customers.”
“Connectwise has been through two years of heavy integration work, mostly through the pandemic. They seem to be aware of the impact that has had on their partner MSPs, and I appreciated seeing a more unified vision that connects directly to the needs that we have right now. Their investments in security seem to finally be in a place to create a significant impact for us.”
“Attending the IT Nation event in person again was a great and energizing experience. The continued investment by ConnectWise (CW) in powerful cybersecurity tools and the cyber research unit are critically important for the MSP community, as new threats continue to create risk across the industry.
“The new Asio platform that was announced is a welcome addition. A single-pane-of-glass management interface which elegantly and natively provides access to all of the CW tools should result in significant efficiency and productivity gains for MSP service teams.
“Integration of the new Connectwise RMM product, which promises to be more cloud-centric and fitting for the continued [work from anywhere] trend, is a central component. As always, convenience does present some risk in the form of a single point of failure, or elevated tool concentration and dependency on a single vendor. While MSPs should certainly consider these risks, we do consider the new platform and aforementioned potential efficiency gains to be a net positive.”
“It is all well and good to “put everything in one spot” as [ConnectWise chief product officer] Jeff Bishop said, but …
“We all remember the announcement about Solarflare, which compromised some of the best cybersecurity vendors going. Advice and guidance from these companies were to disconnect the servers, shut them down and bin them. They couldn’t guarantee cleaning them back up.
“Recalling the Facebook/Twitter outage, which caused Microsoft products like Teams to get caught up in network contention as users switched (temporarily) to Teams to message friends and colleagues through the outage — this was all because a piece of code was run that shut stuff down. And because it all runs on their own platforms with one system, the techs who usually message each other as they are all remote, simply couldn’t. They couldn’t email and they were essentially locked out of their own systems until somebody physically went and pushed the reset button.
“One place for everything sounds great, but if it goes wrong, it will go wrong big! Think about aircrafts or spacecrafts — they usually have four redundant systems which have no common path … I wonder why?
“Commercially, why should we be interested in yet another company trying to dominate the market? All these tools do more or less the same thing, the APIs are all very good, (the first question you should ask is, “can I get my data out if I want to, and in what usable format?) and also once the company does dominate, they can dictate [pricing]. Microsoft, for example, is [raising] pricing by 20% this year. How many companies have the luxury of increasing their prices to customers by 20% and still expect to keep them?”
“It was great to learn about the new advancements occurring at ConnectWise and the solutions they are adding to their portfolio. With the uptick of cyber breaches and bad actor activity, we need to do everything we can to keep our clients safe and protected. I am confident that Connectwise’s new releases will continue to help us do that in a more effective and efficient matter.”
“It was great to learn about the new advancements occurring at ConnectWise and the solutions they are adding to their portfolio. With the uptick of cyber breaches and bad actor activity, we need to do everything we can to keep our clients safe and protected. I am confident that Connectwise’s new releases will continue to help us do that in a more effective and efficient matter.”
ConnectWise IT Nation Connect 2021 is a wrap. The event was filled with lively discussions on cybersecurity, M&A activity and 2022 predictions. The event kicked off with an opening keynote featuring a series of new product developments and program announcements key to the company’s MSP customers.
These included the introduction of the Asio platform, and various cybersecurity and information security investments. Also included were the new ConnectWise RMM solution, the Modes Theory methodology, and several others.
We wanted to learn what MSPs and others in attendance thought of how the announcements and updates might impact their businesses. So we sat down with several partners at the ConnectWise IT Nation Connect to get their take.
Click through our slideshow above to check out our partner insights.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Allison Francis or connect with her on LinkedIn. |
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