Former OnForce CEO Jeffrey Leventhal is preparing his next business move. It’s called Work Market — a SaaS-based labor resource management platform for VARs and managed services providers. Work Market, hosted in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), is set to include a range of features — including some PSA (professional services automation) capabilities. Here’s the strategy.
Leventhal certainly has a grand vision for Work Market. The beta platform will shift to production in January 2011, offering project management, labor management (for employees, contractors and partners) and free PSA capabilities to solutions providers. But just how much PSA will Work Market offer? In Leventhal’s mind: Enough to spark interest from VARs and MSPs, though it doesn’t sound like he’ll match established players feature-for-feature.
Still, let’s keep Leventhal’s efforts in perspective — especially as they relate to key trends in the managed services market. Free doesn’t always guarantee success. And very often, paid platforms continue to generate growth even as free alternatives find their niche.
A prime example is the remote monitoring and management (RMM) software market. Spiceworks offers a free, advertising-based remote monitoring platform, but anecdotal evidence suggests the paid RMM software market also continues to grow.
Over in the PSA market, some upstarts (such as Own Web Now’s Shockey Monkey effort) have tried to disrupt the PSA market. Also, Kaseya has been building a Business Center PSA offering. But the established PSA industry players (primarily ConnectWise, Autotask and Tigerpaw Software) have done a good job building loyal communities, which help to fuel long-term growth.
One could argue that the ConnectWise IT Nation conference is now the IT channel’s biggest annual summit. Meanwhile, Autotask Community Live has grown each year since launch; and Tigerpaw has just confirmed the date and location for its second-annual summit (Oct. 19-21, 2011, Dallas, Texas). I believe those face-to-face engagements generate long-term loyalty, and stronger relationships between vendors and customers (in this case, VARs and MSPs).
Pursuing Big IT Vendors?
I doubt Work Market will try to build a channel community through conferences and events. But I do think Leventhal will try to work with larger integrators, solutions providers and technology companies that need project management, labor management and some PSA rolled all into one SaaS platform. Afterall, Leventhal and his Work Market team had relationships with global 2000 IT companies during their time at OnForce. The trend may repeat itself at Work Market.
Another thought: Rather than disrupting the traditional PSA players, I wonder if Work Market will wind up competing a bit with NetSuite OpenAir, a cloud-based PSA system used by thousands of IT contractors and business leaders in other verticals.
To reiterate: Work Market remains in beta, so we won’t get any preliminary answers until some early production customers come online in January 2011.
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Posted In: Professional Services Automation (PSA) | Service Level Agreements | Software as a Service and Hardware as a Service
Tags: Autotask | Autotask Community Live! | Business Center PSA | ConnectWise | ConnectWise IT Nation | Jeffrey Leventhal | Kaseya | NetSuite OpenAir | OnForce | Own Web Now | Shockey Monkey | Spiceworks | Tigerpaw Software | Tigerpaw User Conference
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Are you trying to get me killed Joe?
Shockey Monkey is NOT a disruptor to the PSA space, we are not a competitor to ConnectWise or Autotask, we’re their strategic partners. We even publish a migration solution to take Shockey Monkey data and port directly to Autotask (not to mention deep product integration, a commercial OranguTime solution for Autotask, etc). We in fact do not market or sell against our AT/CW pals.
That said, we feel that the basics of running and managing an MSP need to be free in order to be effective. As you’ve covered already this week http://www.mspmentor.net/2010/12/21/exchangedefender-launches-three-managed-email-services/ in order to deliver the service you have to provide the ENTIRE solution – that includes a lot of stuff that isn’t in CW/AT and isn’t even remotely possible using their APIs at this time but hopefully very soon.
In terms of the opportunity for the solution, I can tell you that it’s much hotter than the PSA space. According to a recent email from ConnectWise, their platform is growing at 100 portals per month. If those numbers are accurate, then the “free” solution is growing much faster. And remember – just because there is no price ticket on the software it doesn’t mean that the company isn’t generating profits on top of it – don’t discount the revenue that comes in from advertising, promoting vendors products, profit share from third party integrations and so on.
-Vlad
Hey Vlad,
I apologize if I mis-characterized your plans and positioning for Shockey Monkey. But your own press release positioned Shockey Monkey as a potentially disruptive free PSA tool…
-jp
Joe,
It was a typo
Merry Christmas man!
-Vlad