Technology Reseller v07

technolog y reseller.co.uk MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS 33 Q&A Technology Reseller discusses market developments, including a certain acquisition, with Mark Banfield, Senior Vice President & General Manager International at Autotask Underpinning the platform is the concept of contract management – the billing relationship MSPs have with their customers. When an MSP sets up service agreements, they typically include and exclude certain assets. For example, they might choose to provide support to desktops and servers, but not printers. What happens then is that, because these systems are immature, when a customer calls in, the service provider ends up providing proactive support on every item the customer might have, because the system can’t tell whether it should be within contract or outside contract. With our system, when a customer calls in, the service desk system knows exactly what’s included or excluded and charges the right amount of money accordingly. That’s one small example of how Autotask revolutionises the experience. The second thing is that our platform is effectively a single pane of glass for what we call RMM, a remote monitoring and management tool that the IT solution provider would use to manage their customers’ computing estate – to run diagnostics, to remote control devices, to do patch management and software deployment. You can’t be a managed service provider if you don’t have this type of technology in place. About three years ago, we took the decision to acquire our own RMM technology by buying a UK business called CentraStage and integrating it into the PSA system. Now, instead of using two different systems to provide proactive support, the ITSP can use one system and have a single pane of glass through which they can manage the customer remotely, do remote control and access asset information. That’s been very, very successful for us. Then, about two years ago we acquired a company called Soonr. It came with two technologies; one was file sync and share, being able to share your documents easily and securely in the cloud; and the other was an endpoint backup solution for backing up your files and folders from the desktop, from the endpoint or from the fileserver to the cloud. In this way, we have created a unified platform for managed services, offering the business management and service management you need to run your business operations day-to-day; proactive endpoint management, which due to the proliferation of endpoints that need managing and servicing, is an exploding area for MSPs; and managed service opportunities like file sync and share that our customers can take to their customers and provision, manage and bill from within the actual PSA platform. Now, Vista has acquired Datto and merged Datto and Autotask. This is a really strong proposition for our customer base because the two companies are incredibly complementary to one another and there’s practically no crossover. Datto is the most successful business continuity backup disaster recovery (BDR) provider to MSPs, bar none. And, for business management RMM, we are the most successful, so that’s a very nice combination. In the context of enabling MSPs to launch, manage and provision managed services quicker, integrating Autotask technology with Datto’s will make a really compelling proposition. Technology Reseller (TR): Before we talk about the Datto acquisition specifically, please could you tell our readers a little about Autotask and its offering for managed service providers (MSPs) and IT service providers (ITSPs). Mark Banfield (MB): Of course. Autotask provides a suite of technology solutions into the IT services/managed services space, with the objective of enhancing efficiency, improving productivity and creating greater business intelligence to help customers grow their managed services business. The core of the proposition is what we call PSA (professional services automation), a full-fledged business management platform that an IT services provider would use to run their business. As IT service providers grow, they tend to implement different technologies to run their business – CRM, service desk ticketing, time tracking, billing, accounting etc.. Using multiple, disparate systems to keep track of what’s happening in a business is cumbersome and particularly challenging for managed service providers that have to track everything they do, for every customer. The Autotask PSA platform allows them to transform the way they run their business, to become more efficient, to be more productive and to revolutionise the experience and the service they provide to their customers. With our system, when a customer calls in, the service desk system knows exactly what’s included or excluded and charges the right amount of money accordingly Continued... Last month, private equity firm Vista Equity acquired data protection solutions provider Datto and merged it with Autotask, the cloud-based IT business management platform provider. Following the announcement, James Goulding spoke to Mark Banfield, Autotask’s Senior Vice President & General Manager International, about developments in the IT and managed services space and what the Datto acquisition means for Autotask and its customers. Mark Banfield