The Big Financial Question: How Does RMM Really Help MSPs?

Question Mark 2

CoreConnex, which promotes the Corelytics Financial Dashboard for MSPs, has launched benchmarking research focused on RMM software. “This is the first financial benchmarking initiative around RMM usage for the IT services industry,” claims Tony Lael, executive VP of CoreConnex, in an email. “We are learning about financial performance, trends and benefits related to fixed fee managed services with RMM as the center-piece. The data is going to help IT service companies make more informed decisions on service pricing, labor allocation and overhead allocation — all of which drive bottom-line performance in managed services contracts.”

Right now, CoreConnex is working with three well-known RMM software providers — Kaseya, Level Platforms and N-able. Future research with additional RMM vendors is expected. The goal, according to Lael, is to provide business intelligence that is vendor neutral.

Generally speaking, it sounds like RMM vendors are participating — driving MSPs into the CoreConnex project — in order to promote the greater good of the managed services market, rather than trying to position one RMM tool as better than another. That’s refreshing.

I wonder if the PSA (professional services automation) players — Autotask, ConnectWise and Tigerpaw Software — would consider a similar research project led by an external, vendor-neutral BI firm. Indeed, it seems like 70,000 or more resellers have yet to discover the power of PSA software. If there was some vendor-neutral research that promoted the power of PSA, perhaps more resellers would open their wallets for the software.

For its part, CoreConnex first told MSPmentor about its business intelligence ambitions back in January 2011.

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