Former ConnectWise CEO Wins Applause From MSPs, Rivals

'I think the community he’s built. I think the ways he’s brought ConnectWise together, he’s been at the forefront of that, I think that will be a significant part of his legacy,' says Peter Mebly, president of New Charter Technologies one of ConnectWise largest MSP customers.

ConnectWise's new CEO Manny Rivelo has some big shoes to fill as partners and competitors alike tell CRN that former leader Jason Magee, who stepped down recently after five years at the helm, took the MSP-focused vendor to new heights.

“I think the community he’s built. I think the ways he’s brought ConnectWise together, he’s been at the forefront of that, I think that will be a significant part of his legacy,” said Peter Mebly, president of New Charter Technologies, one of ConnectWise’s largest MSP customers.

“Being willing to step out and take on the Asio project will be an important part of his legacy,” he said. “The thing I’ve appreciated most about him is I think the thing that some people struggle with. He’s a no-nonsense leader. He doesn’t put a lot of polish on things. He’s not trying to sugarcoat things. He understands the MSP experience.”

Last week, ConnectWise announced that Magee was taking on the role of executive advisor and a new CEO, Rivelo, was coming in to take over.

Magee joined ConnectWise in 2011 from CA Technologies, where he had been director of channel sales. He was named CEO when company founder Arnie Bellini stepped down after the sale to private equity in February 2019. As CEO, Magee tripled the company’s top line revenue, radically overhauled its cybersecurity business, launched a new product platform and ended his five years at the helm with the acquisition of Axcient and Skykick.

“Jason was a man of his word. He was very active and responsive in the community. He was never one to avoid taking the tough issues head on,” Craig Fulton told CRN.

Fulton started with ConnectWise in 2009, not long before Magee. Both rose through the ranks to earn C-level positions in 2016. Magee was named chief operating officer in February 2016 while Fulton became chief product officer in October of that year.

“I loved how present he was with ConnectWise partners: always up late at events giving his time to whomever wanted it, responding on social platforms, and driving in-person events within the IT Nation,” Fulton said. “With his departure I feel this is the end of an era. He was the final executive leader from the original days under Arnie’s command.”

N-able CEO John Pagliuca has run his Burlington, Mass.-based ConnectWise rival since 2016, competing with Magee for MSP customers and for the technology the companies use to help those customers.

He said Magee understood what MSPs are up against and he “moved the industry forward.”

“I mean this genuinely, Jason's a really good human being. We wish him the best. He’s a class act. He did a lot to move the industry forward,” he said. “He really genuinely understood the ethos of an MSP. What they built in ConnectWise, from a community point of view, it's noteworthy. I pinged him separately and privately, and I said hey, I tip my hat off to you, man. So good luck to the to that future.”

Longtime ConnectWise customer Jason Slagle runs Toledo, Ohio-based MSP CNWR Inc., and speaks frequently about the company’s wins and its failings. He said what Magee did best was to focus ConnectWise employees on helping MSPs

“Jason did a really good job of keeping people who care within the organization. So many people that I interact with, they are great people and they very easily could have moved on, probably for more money. But they stayed because they believe in the mission,” Slagle said.

Because of that drive, ConnectWise has a deep bench of account managers and MSP-facing employees who want to help the company’s customers.

“They’ve got a whole bunch of people at the bottom that care a ton,” Slagle said. “They legitimately care about their partners. There are people in support who legitimately care about their partners.”

Magee started as ConnectWise’s director of worldwide channel in 2011, but by July 2015 he was executive vice president of strategies and acquisitions. He was in the first talks that private equity giant Thoma Bravo had with ConnectWise in late 2015.

Thoma Bravo announced that it acquired ConnectWise in February 2019, with founder Arnie Bellini telling CRN it entertained offers from eight equity funds before choosing Thoma Bravo.

At the same time ConnectWise was entertaining offers, the cybersecurity landscape for its products and its customers was devolving into a minefield as ransomware operators seized on the power of RMM tools to infect thousands of endpoints via MSPs.

The company’s ScreenConnect product was used by cybercriminals in Texas to seize 23 towns via a ransomware attack. It only happened because the MSP was using an on-premises version of the tool that had not been updated.

Companies like Elliot Park, Md.-based Huntress emerged to help MSPs through sophisticated EDR and bringing best-in-class security practices to the channel. However, in the early days many ITSM providers, including ConnectWise, treated all security researchers with suspicion.

“This is a company that would not acknowledge their bugs. When you reported them, they would get legal involved. This is me personally being involved in several of those conversations myself,” he told CRN. “That type of culture has almost evaporated and disappeared and rightfully so, because if he would have kept that, ConnectWise would have seen massive churn.”

Under Magee, ConnectWise bought cybersecurity firm Perch in 2020. The company has seen the revenue it gains from security increase by large double-digits, 23, 34, and 41 percent growth each year in 2021, 2022, and 2023, since the Perch acquisition.

Hanslovan gave Magee an A-minus to B-plus for Magee’s five years in charge.

“That’s the hard part about this. ConnectWise at the end of the day is owned by private equity. Private equity wants to do good, but it also needs to make a buck. Those two different verbs: wants versus needs. I think some of the decisions haven’t always put the community first,” Hanslovan said. “I think Jason has done a real good job sending them out with a bang. If I had to balance that struggle between those two. At the end of the day, I really think customers are happy with ConnectWise products and as a result, they must be doing something right.”