IT Nation Connect: New ConnectWise CEO Vows Continued Innovation

IT NATION CONNECT — IT Nation Connect opened Wednesday with Jason Magee passing the torch to ConnectWise’s new CEO, Manny Rivelo, who promised continued innovation to the community.

Rivelo is in his fifth week as ConnectWise’s CEO. He previously was CEO of Forcepoint, and before that held senior leadership roles at industry giants including F5 Networks, Arista and Cisco Systems.

Magee said this week ends his 13-year journey with ConnectWise.

“As the CEO of ConnectWise and leading the IT Nation, I've had the privilege of working alongside and with all of you in this room, achieving things that I could never have dreamed of or imagined alone,” he said. “Together, we've navigated some truly defining moments, from the unprecedented challenges of the global pandemic to capitalizing on the groundbreaking opportunities around cyber and automation. Every step of the way, I've seen us rise to meet each new challenges head on and seize each new opportunity.”

Rivelo Tells IT Nation Connect Massive SMB Opportunity Awaits

Rivelo cited a Canalys statistic showing global IT spending has reached $5.4 trillion.

“Now pause for a second, that's 5%-6% of the worldwide GDP, which is growing,” he said. “And you can see the numbers here for managed services, over $600 billion. And that's growing at double digits as we move. So this is a massive market that is out there that is growing on a continuous basis. And the interesting stuff, when you start to peel this back, is that 44% of that total addressable market (TAM) is SMB. There are millions of companies out there and it's massive. ... If you start thinking about it, you are fulfilling products and you're driving those to your end customers also, so from a channel perspective, it's higher, it's 73%. So there is an infinite amount of opportunity out there. And it continues to grow because the disruptions continue to be there.

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"And to be perfectly honest," he continued, "the end customers, the SMB customers, with the complexity that's ahead, are fully dependent on this room. There is no way around it. They can't in-source this technology. How do you hire somebody who maybe could take care of your PCs, but do they understand the cloud environment? Do they understand security? There's a lot of nuance in that. They need your expertise to deliver that, and they need your expertise to be focused on the outcomes so they can do their business, and continue to prosper and grow.”

After booming during the pandemic, managed services revenue growth is stabilizing at a healthy 12%, Rivelo said.

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IT Nation Community Supports, Lifts One Another

Being ConnectWise’s CEO is an “enviable” position, Rivelo said.

“I've presented to rooms. I've presented to different verticals in the enterprise space, and I cannot get three bankers to sit in the same room,” he said. “You can't get Citibank next to Chase to talk about technology, to talk about best practices, to talk about anything, but yet here, the community thrives on that. And we support each other and lift each other, and you provide all that feedback. So this is not just a community. This is much greater than that. It's an enviable position to be in and this is something that we will protect for sure.”

Addressing the massive SMB market takes a platform, Rivelo said.

“You have 20-40 different technology stacks that you integrate as best as you can, and you use human middleware people to do a lot of that integration,” he said. “It's inefficient, it's costly, and guess what? It's only going to get more complex because the technology continues to come and it's coming at an ever-increasing pace. So we wholeheartedly believe, and we started on this vision a long time ago, that a platform can transform this industry, give it the growth that it deserves and the profitability that it deserves, and there's better days ahead.”

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Continuing ConnectWise’s Mission

ConnectWise set out on a “very simple” mission from a business perspective, Rivelo said.

“This is to empower you and to give you unmatched software services, and create this community so you can achieve whatever your goals are, as ambitious as you want to make your goals,” he said. “This is something that I will continue to honor and we will continue to protect at ConnectWise. I want you to be sure of that because the power is in this room. It is not just in us as an individual. A platform is a vehicle to unlock incredible amounts of value at the bottom. It helps you with your cogs, which is broken down into two facets. It's broken down into what you spend for software. There are a couple other things there, like facilities, etc., but it's broken down into your software that you buy, the tech stack you buy, which is roughly 20%-25% of your costs. And then 75% is your people, the people that are managing and that are helping you. A platform could help unlock value by creating efficiency. If you build the right platform, you could also begin to layer on top of it monetization strategies around security, data protection, and the list goes on, all integrated in a simple way for you to consume it and for you to deliver it to the end customer to create a better experience.”

ConnectWise is committed to adding a lot of innovation for the IT Nation community in the years ahead, Rivelo said.

“You can start looking at Asio, the simplification of bringing together professional services automation (PSA), and I'm adding to it AI and robotic process automation (RPA) to tackle the cost of your business,” he said. “If you're looking for revenue streams, there's a lot of stuff we're adding on top − security services, backup services, a full blown ecosystem − and we will continue to build on that, also making it easier for you to deliver that. And then on top of that is why we're here. We are here because we want a network. We want to learn; we want to share. It's this community on top of all of that. And this is the innovation we will bring year in, year out for this community as we move forward.”