Axcient CEO On ConnectWise Partnership: ‘There Are Economic Savings And Time Savings For Partners’

‘By offloading a lot of the day-to-day management capabilities to the NOC and having a simpler solution, that consolidation allows [MSPs] to take their limited resources and then go focus on things like DR testing, finding new customers and doing things that are a higher value-add for their own business,’ says Axcient CEO Rod Mathews.

ConnectWise’s latest partnership with business continuity and disaster recovery vendor Axcient is a move to help further consolidate an MSP’s security stack into a seamless, easy-to-use and efficient platform that also saves the MSP money.

“We’ve been integrating with ConnectWise for years, all the way back to when the API programs first started,” Rod Mathews, Axcient CEO, told CRN. “We’ve had a long-standing partnership and given some of the consolidation in the industry … there’s a big movement in the industry to figure out how to consolidate on more efficient, more effective platforms.”

He said the combination of ConnectWise’s managed NOC services, RMM capabilities and the Asio platform, plus the benefits Axcient brings to the market, build a “unique, strong solution” that helps Axcient partners become more efficient and save money.

[Related: ConnectWise CEO: We’re In A ‘Time Horizon’ To Be Acquired]

“They want to grow and they want to make their business more efficient,” he said. “This whole solution is going to help them do that.”

ConnectWise RMM customers will be able to quickly access Axcient business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) tools, which are available on ConnectWise’s Asio platform today from the RMM dashboard to ensure they are up to date on alerts and system health. Co-managed backup service customers can even eliminate up to 90 percent of the cost and time associated with BCDR, including planning, deployment, management, testing and support. Partners can also now accrue market development funds through the ConnectWise partner program because of this partnership.

Ameer Karim, executive vice president and general manager of unified monitoring and management at Tampa, Fla.-based ConnectWise, said taking its managed backup offering and pairing it with Axcient’s offering provides a “simpler, unified and seamless solution for our partners.”

“It’s a one-stop shop. Everything’s built on the Asio platform and it’s seamlessly integrated into ConnectWise RMM,” he said. “This is one of those things that we should have done a long time ago.”

If there’s a threat disaster of some sort, partners want to be able to get up and running pretty quickly, Karim said. The managed backup offering comes in and offloads what technicians have to do on a daily basis.

Benefits of the Axcient integration include simplified management from one dashboard, turnkey appliances and fully managed backup, which is appliance-based or direct-to-cloud with Axcient x360Recover.

“There are economic savings and time savings,” Mathews said. “The current environment [makes] it’s hard to hire technical people, scale your team and focus on all the things that you should do as a partner. By offloading a lot of the day-to-day management capabilities to the NOC and having a simpler solution, that consolidation allows [MSPs] to take their limited resources and then go focus on things like DR testing, finding new customers and doing things that are a higher value-add for their own business.

“At the end of the day, if you can’t save people money they’re not going to change,” he added.

Karim said most MSPs think of backup as a separate entity from their traditional security stack, “but security is really seamless at this point.”

“Partners already have a lot to manage and they have a lot of vendors to choose from,” he said. “Wherever we can further simplify that, in this case with our partnership with Axcient, it just further simplifies things. We’ll help the partner, get them on-boarded and do the support … we’ll do everything.”

John Douglass, president of Wichita, Kan.-based MSP Pileus Technologies, and an Axcient partner, said Axcient’s product is “beyond any other product out there on the market.”

“From a support standpoint, they’re on top of it,” he told CRN.

And as a former ConnectWise partner, he said this partnership may convince him to give ConnectWise another try.

“The things that ConnectWise is doing are making us rethink and refocus and could potentially win our business back,” he said.