5 Things You Can Expect From Atera In 2017

No Slowing Down

Atera just celebrated the first anniversary of its launch in January 2016, but the developer of software for managed service providers isn't sitting still, recently announcing plans to triple its revenue and customer installed base by the end of 2017.

"At our current velocity, [tripling our revenue] isn't a crazy goal, … we can achieve it," said CEO Gil Pekelman in an interview with CRN. The startup will double-down on its investments, he said, including building out its executive team and spending on R&D to continue developing the technology behind its software.

Last year Atera went on a tear, Pekelman said, building up its customer base by targeting smaller MSPs that wanted to expand their services, but couldn't afford the remote mobile management (RMM), remote access, help desk, billing and reporting software sold by established vendors.

Now the startup is ready to go after larger MSP clients and has its competitive sights set on the major players in the MSP software market. Based on Pekelman's roadmap, here are five things we can expect to see from the startup this year.

New Executives

Pekelman aims to ramp up Atera's growth by hiring new executives and boosting the number of employees.

Atera will be bolstering its marketing and customer support teams and hiring a vice president-level manager for each operation.

Bringing on seasoned executives to fill the customer support and marketing VP positions will help push Atera deeper into the MSP market and expose the company's applications to a greater number of MSPs.

Doubling R&D Investment

The company will be doubling its research and development spending, Pekelman said, pushing to expand the company's application offerings to better serve its current base of smaller MSPs and to engage larger MSPs as potential customers.

Winning new, larger customers is a key part of Atera's strategic roadmap. And it's with those potential customers that the startup expects to compete more directly against established – what Pekelman calls "legacy" – vendors of RMM, PSA and Remote Access applications.

"Large customers have a larger number of technicians. Because of that, they have different needs and it is important that we are able to engage them there," he said.

Increasing Big Data Utilization

Some of that R&D investment is also being devoted to leveraging the huge volumes of data generated by the Atera applications to gain insights into how to improve its software.

Thanks to Atera's business model, which allows MSP customers to support an unlimited number of agents, its applications produce a "huge amount of data," which is constantly being analyzed by Atera's data scientists, according to Pekelman.

Big Data, the CEO said, is one of Atera's differentiators. "We have a unique capability there."

Increasing Machine Learning Capabilities

As Atera analyzes the big data it collects from clients, the company will also be looking to leverage that information in another of its investments: machine learning.

Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that software uses to adapt to new data without the need for new programming. As machine learning is ingrained in software like Atera's, it takes the burden of mundane tasks away from the business managers that Atera serves and allows them to focus on more important tasks.

"Machine learning is huge," Pekelman said, explaining that he is very excited about the future of the technology.

Adding Cybersecurity Functionality

Potentially the largest investment Atera is looking to make in 2017 is the addition of security capabilities to the company's applications.

Atera's headquarters is in Tel Aviv, Israel, a center of cybersecurity technology development. Pekelman said that adding cybersecurity elements to the company's products will give it another competitive differentiator and way to support its customer MSPs.

"We want to take the most innovative technologies and bring them into the MSP World," he said.