ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo Says Asio ‘Ready For Primetime’
‘We've been talking about Asio for numerous years. We've been showing you glimpses of Asio. I'm here to tell you that we are at that tipping point. I'm here to tell you that it is ready for prime time,’ ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo told IT Nation 2024
ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo said the long-promised Asio platform that blends the company’s stack of MSP products into a single pane of glass is already being used by 3,000 partners and the remote monitoring and management packed inside of it is being used on 2.2 million endpoints.
“I'm here to tell you that we are at that tipping point. I'm here to tell you that it is ready for prime time,” he told the crowd at the company’s IT Nation 2024 conference on Wednesday. “We have hit that inflection point.”
It was Rivelo’s first keynote as CEO of Tampa, Fla.-based ConnectWise, which has 45,000 customers around the world who use its ticketing system, remote monitoring and management tools, or security products to deliver IT services. ConnectWise’s private equity owners replaced CEO Jason Magee in September.
“We just put PSA on the platform and we’ve been early-accessing that for a while now,” Rivello said, adding that of the 3,000 using the platform, 1,000 are using the newly embedded PSA, which he said is still in early access as they test it.
He said the average MSP environment has become too complex and Asio addresses that by folding in all of ConnectWise’s products.
“You have 20 to 40 different technology stacks that you integrate as best as you can, and you use human middleware -- people -- to do a lot of that integration. It is inefficient, it's costly. And guess what? It's only going to get more complex,” Rivelo said. “So we wholeheartedly believe, and we started on this vision a long time ago, but a platform can transform this industry, give it the growth that it deserves and the profitability that it deserves, and there's better days ahead.”
The Asio platform debuted at the 2021 IT Nation and since then ConnectWise has invested $70 million to bring that to market, Rivelo told CRN earlier this year. Rivelo said when it’s ready it will be the first of its kind package of tools for MSPs on one platform. He said it is nearing release at an optimal time for MSPs who are serving a $600 billion market, with 44 percent of that focused on small and medium-size businesses.
Rivelo said the platform concept drives lower costs at the MSP by aligning the software and the users in a single place to create efficiencies. He called out Microsoft, Salesforce, and Amazon Web Services as platforms that are doing it right.
“If you build the right platform, you could also begin to layer on top of it, monetization strategies around security, data protection and the list goes on and on, all integrated in a simple way for you to consume it and for you to deliver it to the end customer, to create a better, better experience,” he said.
Security360
Security has been a massive revenue driver at ConnectWise since it acquired cybersecurity firm Perch, with annual revenue in that category growing by double-digits each year. Rivelo said to think about Security360 as an attack surface management tool that takes in data from the customer to give them a security rating.
“We could take a lot of your information, your AV information, your email information, vulnerabilities, and the list goes on and on, and begin to display it around a common customer and actually give them a securityindex, or rating to see about the health of that organization,” he said.
He said Security360 normalizes the data to generate a score that highlights risk exposure across the MSP’s client base. This score shows MSPs where they could prioritize remediation efforts.
ConnectWise Security360 integrates with its PSA and RMM tools. It also supports Microsoft Defender Antivirus, Microsoft Defender for Business, Webroot Antivirus, Bitdefender GravityZone Endpoint Detection and Response, Acronis Security + EDR, SentinelOne Singularity Control, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, Infima Security, and Proofpoint Email Security.
Additional integrations are expected in the coming months.
ConnectWise Backup360
Rivelo said the offering is now generally available to partners. He said this allows MSPs to monitor their customer’s environments with a “360-degree” view to ensure backups are happening on schedule, whether it is an endpoint, cloud, or a SaaS backup.
He said it has integrations with Axcient, Acronis, Veeam, Datto, SkyKick Cloud Backup and more to be added, he said.
“There’s an exciting opportunity there also,” he said. “That’s a very simple set of products that you can deploy for your clients.”