ConnectWise: We’re Supporting The MSPs Who Support SMBs

‘ConnectWise changed the narrative. [We have] about 40 years of experience. We don’t know everything. But we’ve been building, we’ve been acquiring, and we’ve been getting feedback,’ says Melvin Montalvo, strategic partner sales executive at ConnectWise.

MSPs focused on the SMB market are in the right place at the right time, especially if they have the right support behind them.

That’s the message from Melvin Montalvo, strategic partner sales executive at Tampa, Fla.-based MSP technology platform provider ConnectWise.

Montalvo, who ran his own MSP business between 2006 and 2015, told MSPs attending this week’s XChange conference in Denver that the IT spend by SMB companies within the next five years is expected to hit $200 billion annually. XChange is hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company.

[Related: CONNECTWISE CEO JASON MAGEE ON GROWTH, THE NEW ASIO PLATFORM AND DISPELLING RUMORS]

“These SMBs need technical services, the same way they need health care and financial services from experts,” he said. “Technology is not going anywhere, guys.”

Montalvo said MSPs catering to the SMB market are facing many of the same challenges they faced in 2006 when he ran his own MSP, particularly around attracting and retaining talent and managing increased risk, but also challenges around accelerating recurring revenue, conveying the business value of managed services, how to grow sales and how to scale staff productivity.

“Now, imagine if you could take all these challenges, turn them into opportunities, and make it happen with one single partner,” he said. “I’m here to say you can. ConnectWise changed the narrative. [We have] about 40 years of experience. We don’t know everything. But we’ve been building, we’ve been acquiring, and we’ve been getting feedback.”

ConnectWise started in 1982 as an MSP itself and by 1995 had developed its own remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool, which it then used to morph into a provider of technology to other MSPs, Montalvo said. The company launched its IT Nation community in 2005, he said.

Fast forward to November, and ConnectWise introduced its Asio unified platform that provides MSPs with a single user interface to offer an improved user experience and let MSPs easily manage end-user access, all in a single pane of glass, Montalvo said.

“[Asio] is a unified platform with automation, infinite scalability,” he said. “It’s meant to tie in all of our solutions with integration for your business. You’ve got security, you’ve got core services, you have AI and machine learning.”

ConnectWise today is a global company with 2,700 employees working out of 11 offices around the world, Montalvo said. The company also has over 700 engineers focused on product development and over 1,000 dedicated experts serving MSPs.

ConnectWise also continues to expand its community, Montalvo said. The company’s IT Nation conference last year attracted about 2,700 attendees, including MSPs, vendors and ConnectWise employees, and IT Nation 2022 in November is expected to attract 3,000 attendees, he said.

As a result of all the investment ConnectWise has made in supporting MSPs, MSPs working with the company now serve over 1 million SMB customers with over 11.4 million endpoints managed by its RMM technology, Montalvo said. Over 300 third-party technologies have been integrated into ConnectWise’s platform.

Security also has become a big focus at ConnectWise. The company’s security information and event management (SIEM) technology is ingesting about 52 million events per minute. ConnectWise has 165 full-time security engineers, he said. “Some people might say ConnectWise is a cybersecurity company,” he said.

As a ConnectWise partner, Hermann Masser, president of El Paso, Texas-based Masser Technologies, which has 18 employees managing over 2,000 endpoints would like to learn how to leverage ConnectWise’s professional services.

“I’m hoping to see if we can leverage those services so we can augment our high-end engineers,” he said. “Sometimes it’s hard to find good talent in certain areas, and ConnectWise’s position is that it can bring us that talent at a lower rate. I’m not looking to replace my engineers because we have very good talent. We just want to augment our capabilities.”

That aside, Masser said his company appreciates the single ecosystem that ConnectWise brings to his company and its customers.

“What we benefited the most from ConnectWise is its ecosystem, a single platform to manage everything,” he said. “And then as they have been acquiring new companies and bringing in new offerings under ConnectWise, we have also taken advantage of those. The integrations are very important for us. ConnectWise has increased our productivity.”