Autotask Finds Its (Service) Ticket To Success

Company:

Headquarters: East Greenbush, N.Y.

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: Autotask Pro

Year Founded: 2001

Number of Channel Partners: 3,000 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Managed Service Provider

Why You Should Care: Autotask's IT services management applications can make a solution provider's life much easier.

The Lowdown: Solution providers often get so entrenched in helping customers solve business problems that they can sometimes neglect their own nagging issues. That's where Autotask comes in. The East Greenbush, N.Y.-based company has developed IT services management tools used by services providers and MSPs since 2001.

With several components, Autotasks applications help solution providers track their support desk resources across customers to better determine where resources might be over- or under-deployed. It also features a ticketing system that tracks a services ticket from opening to closure, providing customers with customized visibility into the data as well.

"At the core, we help solution providers run their business better," said Len DiCostanzo, senior vice president of professional services at Autotask. DiCostanzo ran his own VAR business for many years before joining Autotask. "You're tracking time against projects and support models. It covers how much time you've invested in that all-inclusive [services] contract. Am I making money, or spending too much time on certain areas? Do I need to change my [services] pricing?"

Autotask's newest add-on to the Autotask Client Access Portal is Taskfire, which seeks to alleviate concerns an end user's internal IT staff may have with using an MSP.

"It's basically a service desk, a ticketing tool, used by the internal IT person. Instead of ticket requests going to the VAR, they go to the internal IT person, who can triage the request and close and open the ticket. He can also escalate the ticket to the service provider. It enables the VAR to build a relationship with the internal IT person, instead of the IT person thinking the MSP is out to take his job," DiCostanzo said.

Starting a customer with Taskfire can be a great way for MSPs to get a foot in the door with the end user's IT staff, DiCostanzo said.

"If you do a great job resolving a few services requests, maybe they'll let you do a project or two. And if there's only one IT person, there's going to be a couple hundred hours a year that that person is sick or on vacation. You can turn on an auto-escalate feature to have every service request flow through to the solution provider," he said.