Bots, Hooks, Triggers And Agents: Five Things To Know About ConnectWise’s Asio

‘It’s nice to see them focus on what MSPs need. In the last few years, they’ve been focused on big trends. This is a return to basics in a good way,’ says Dustin Bolander, founder, partner and CIO of Clear Guidance Partners.

ConnectWise Chief Product Officer Jeff Bishop said the company’s new Asio platform is ready to deliver on the vision of its full stack of products managed through a single pane of glass.

“Our priority is to deliver innovation, product stability, ease of use and an open ecosystem, all of which are crucial to our partnership with you and to your continued success, and we know we cannot just rest upon a vision,” Bishop told the audience during a presentation at the company’s annual show IT Nation 2024.

Dustin Bolander, founder, partner and CIO of Austin, Texas-based Clear Guidance Partners, a longtime ConnectWise partner, said from what he has seen so far, the Asio platform is a return to form for the company.

“It’s nice to see them focus on what MSPs need,” Bolander said. “In the last few years, they’ve been focused on big trends. This is a return to basics in a good way.”

Asio is ConnectWise’s vision for a unified platform where MSPs can run all of their products and run their customers’ digital estate from a single place. The technologically ambitious project debuted at IT Nation 2021 and has been in development since.

ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo previously told CRN that pulling it across the finish line is a top priority for him and for ConnectWise’s private equity owner, Thoma Bravo.

Rivelo said Asio has received about $70 million in investment and ConnectWise is prepared to spend whatever it takes to make it a success.

“We just put PSA on the platform and we’ve been early accessing that for a while now,” Rivelo told the crowd of MSPs at IT Nation Wednesday, adding that of the 3,000 MSPs using the platform, 1,000 are using the newly embedded PSA, which he said is still in early access as they test it.

During his presentation, Bishop said the team designing Asio has kept the MSP’s ease of using the platform top of mind.

“Asio is our purpose-built, enterprise-grade platform for the MSP community that centralizes your products, your data, provides a common user experience and removes a lot of the manual work you have to do today for on-boarding employees, customers and integrating disparate solutions,” Bishop said.

What’s New With Asio?

Bishop said that inside Asio, the product has a PSA, an RMM, ConnectWise Security 360 vulnerability management, data protection, robotic process automation, dozens and hundreds of integrations and more than 150 shared services that all of those products are taking advantage of.

Bishop said that there are thousands of users worldwide and the RMM is being used across 2.2 million endpoints. He also said Asio is taking an API-first mentality with development to keep the ecosystem open and scalable for partners.

But it’s more than the products inside, Bishop said, as Asio improves the entire MSP user experience.

“Over the last four or five months, we’ve made lots of different enhancements. We’ve created customized actions, web hooks for triggers, the ability to add variables, time delays. We can incorporate bots as part of the workflows,” he told the audience.
“Look, this is a huge change from what was there last year, and I hope that you have an opportunity to go out there and test that out.”

Why This Is Important To MSPs

Across the solution provider industry, much of the code that makes up the operational software that MSPs use to run their businesses is dated. In many cases, it has been updated as needed, blended together with other products via acquisitions, and repeatedly exploited and patched.

What ConnectWise is attempting to do with Asio is to put all of its tools together in a platform built with modern code that provides a superior experience for the MSP—all the tools to run their business in a unified place—while removing the encumbrances involved with their older software.

“Asio is more than just a pretty wrapper that launches the various product lines,” Bishop said. “It is a true consolidated platform. It provides the experience where the products and services are designed to utilize the same foundational elements to allow our partners to scale and grow faster than they ever thought was possible.”

What Does It Mean For Front-Line Engineers?

Bishop said Asio materially simplifies on-boarding and training for new employees.

“You are no longer having to map companies and sites and devices between all the different disparate products in our portfolio,” he said.

Bishop said Asio does away with the need to match up a user’s security access rights across several different products.

“For a lot of the MSPs I talk to, that is extremely difficult to do,” he said. “These products, with our new centralized service, simplifies that, so it’s just one spot where you go do all that.”

Bishop said Asio also acts as the hub of hyper automation, which he said is like a combination of AI and automation that ConnectWise is working on deploying across its entire product suite to let engineers talk with products.

“It’s a next-gen AI solution that has been integrated with nearly every product inside of our portfolio, and it continues to evolve and grow as we allow it to be accessed inside of Asio,” Bishop said.

Bots And Digital Agents

Bishop described how users can create and incorporate robotic process automation and bots into their workflows, by making one during a live demonstration.

“All you’re having to do is go in and name it, describe it, and then you go in and add your own script into the system, and then you can save that bot, which can then be used inside of Sidekick, inside of a chatbot, in the PSA, or inside of our workflow engine, whatever works for you and for your business processes,” he said.

In looking for ways to improve MSP profitability, Bishop said ConnectWise has been focused on finding ways to automate on-boarding and off-boarding employees and prospects, since MSPs manage this not just for themselves, but for their customers.

“We have started creating our own out-of-the-box automations that will give MSPs a template that you can use for on-boarding, off-boarding, and quite a few more that we’re releasing throughout the rest of this year. One of the big areas that we’re making sure that we have focused on is that on-board and off-board experience because we know that that takes up so much time for your different teams.”

Build It And Share It

Bishop said inside Asio, ConnectWise has its own drag-and-drop workflow design engine that has been simplified for users and now has enhanced features, including the ability to create web hooks for triggers, the addition of time delays and the ability to add variables.

Bishop said one of the priorities inside IT Nation is sharing best practices, so the Asio platform will allow MSPs to share their best creations with their team or with all of ConnectWise’s users.

“Beyond all this, we are also in the process of making sure that you can start to share what you’re building with the community, whether it’s digital workers, workflows or bots,” he said. “Our community concept now allows you to create these and share them with other MSPs that are part of your family, or with the entire IT Nation community.”