I apologize — in advance — for once again positioning ConnectWise and Autotask against each other. It’s not my mission in life. But the rival PSA (professional services automation) software providers continue to counter each other on a range of fronts. The latest move: ConnectWise announced a cloud-based platform today. Next up, Autotask is planning a cloud announcement on Oct. 5. Here are the details plus some perspectives.
Before I dive into the hard news, let’s look at how the PSA market has been evolving. No doubt, ConnectWise and Autotask each claim to be the market leaders — with additional players like Tigerpaw Software, Severa and CommitCRM carving out their own niches.
On-premise vs. Cloud
Generally speaking, most ConnectWise deployments have occurred on-premise while Autotask bet and built its business on a SaaS model. But in the last two months or so, ConnectWise has gradually changed its marketing messaging and search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to emphasize SaaS and cloud efforts.
Is the effort more than marketing? ConnectWise appears to be increasing its R&D on SaaS and cloud offerings. In a press release issued earlier today, ConnectWise said the company had:
“developed a cloud-based platform for unified business process management systems to allow the seamless integration of third-party applications for IT service companies. The new platform provides tight integration between ConnectWise PSA software and other leading products for VARs, MSPs and IT service companies. The ConnectWise Cloud provides on-demand PSA and related business applications such as CRM, financial management, collaboration, sales and service ticketing, inventory, reports and analytics, and enables customers, partners and third-party developers to build and integrate their own hosted applications.”
I must concede: I haven’t tested ConnectWise’s software — neither on premise nor in the cloud. Nor have I tried Autotask’s software. So I’m hardly in a position to direct readers to the “better” solution.
To the best of my knowledge, Autotask started in the cloud. In recent months, ConnectWise has been climbing into the cloud. Ultimately, both companies are striving to grow the managed services market. And sometimes I’m guilty of comparing their strategies too much. But it’s sort of like the old Windows vs. Mac OS debate. People are pretty passionate about the topic. And I’m happy to listen as customers (MSPs) choose sides.
Good to Go?
One other thought: I hear Autotask plans to make a cloud-oriented announcement around Oct. 5. It sounds like it will involve some sort of single-user pricing option for Autotask Go!, which currently has a three-user pricing model. As you may recall, ConnectWise cut its hosted software prices back in July.
Am I the only guy spending too much time watching the competitive moves?
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Posted In: On Premise | PSA | Service Level Agreements | Software as a Service and Hardware as a Service
Tags: Autotask Go! | Autotask vs ConnectWise | Hosted ConnectWise | Hosted PSA | Professional Services Automation | PSA | SaaS PSA
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Joe,
I do not want to derail the main point of this post, but I feel compelled to make this comment. Recently I have been corrected in my own conversations about correct use of the the term “On-Premises”. In short, the industry seems to have adopted using the grammatically incorrect term “On-Premise” for locally installed applications. I think the time has come for many of us to be schooled in the term’s proper usage. Frankly, it is easier to point to the beloved Wikipedia for a more eloquent explanation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-premises_software
-Mike
Mike: Don’t apologize. The comment areas are meant for readers to take the conversation in new directions. I will keep that wikipedia definition in mind.
You commented to tell him to correct his spelling?
Anyway, I think the hosted solutions are better if only for the fact that you never have to worry about your software, be it upgrades or otherwise. Hosted makes it 99.9% available and 0 man hours involved.
Mike: Thanks! I learnt something new today.
We have a lot of places where we talk about our software’s suitability for on-premise & online backups. I saw the Wikipedia link but still can’t see ourselves saying “on-premises software” with a straight face – and making efforts towards explaining to (correcting, rather) everyone that it is indeed the ‘correct usage’.
Perhaps this is one of those cases of “if it is common enough, it is correct”?
Lux
I’ll tell ya what, there are a lot of partners using ConnectWise SaaS now. Every day I speak with more and more partners that are on hosted ConnectWise.
The third party application we wrote for ConnectWise doesn’t work with the SaaS version of ConnectWise yet so… We are working with ConnectWise to get these last couple fields in the API to work and it will be compatible with ConnectWise SaaS (98% done).
Last number I heard was 10% of the partners were on SaaS, that was at the beginning of the recent push ConnectWise has been making. I’m sure those numbers went up by now.
-Chris Chase
P.S. ConnectWise SaaS has been available for years, I just don’t think they started talking about it much until recently. It was available when we purchased ConnectWise 2.5 years ago.
I choose Autotask Go for my tiny MSP operation because ConnectWise didn’t offer a SaaS version at the time, and the startup costs were prohibitive and designed for seemingly larger deployments than what I needed. Now they are trying to steal my business away from Autotask, but it might be “too little too late”. Also, if Autotask comes out with single user pricing, I probably won’t consider switching because my 2nd and 3rd AT accounts rarely get used…
-Dave
http://www.managed-data.com
Chris@5, Dave@6: Thanks for the comments. Good to see multiple viewpoints representing multiple options — presented in a manner where readers feel like they can reach out to you directly if they have more questions.
The CLOUD connectwise has gone down for 2 days in a row, and left us with no answers for hours while they tried to resolve “hardware” issues. We thought that CLOUD computing is virtual and doesn’t rely on hardware. A company such as ConnectWise should NEVER go down and this affects our productivity as we have 20 employees who count on using this system for all facets of our business.
A Cloud that goes down sounds more like RAIN on the parade!
Hey John: Sorry for my long-belated reply. Out at a family event tonight and was also awaiting an official reply from ConnectWise. You’ll find our initial coverage of the outage here.
Have to says sales is there strong suit. After the slick sales cycle you are left dazed and confused as you muddle through a vauge installation on “go-live” process. They cash the check abd start the monthly fees before you are even setup. And forget about support. We have yet to have a support issued resolved even though we get nice emails saying we are important and the issue has now reached level two. I would think level two support would involve a phone call.
As far as the outage goes, we had to thell then we were down. No notice, appolgy, or refund. We still get random crashes even though we have been moved to a “new” server.
I am glad I signed up for the 120-day money back promise, we are ready to pull the plug.
Sorry for all the typos, outrage makes my hands shake.
Not So Happy: We welcome reader feedback but anonymous stuff like this is tricky. Readers who aren’t happy with a specific vendor should be sure to disclose their name/company so that we can be sure the feedback is legitimate.
Normally I would agree, but until this is resolved I have to remain anonymous. This was not posted on a whim, it has dragged on for months.
I did go in with “eye-side-open” as a number of other folks in the industry I spoke with rated Connectwise as the best, but also said it was a Love/Hate relationship.
I think they are suffering from success. Too often the marketing machine gets ahead of the infrastructure, hopefully they will catch up.