I awoke this morning to a post on smbITpros.com about CRM and PSA tools, and the limited scope of products a provider had been looking at for the transition to managed services. What interested me the most was Josh’s mention of how he was shocked to see that the provider had only considered Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.

Personally, I’m really not all that surprised at the lack of most providers’ knowledge of the tools that are out there. When we were starting our company I probably had over 100 hours in research and testing, and playing with Demos before we finally selected Autotask as our vendor of choice. I have to say it was a long and bumpy road to get there, with so many different options crossing my path that many times I forgot which one I was dealing with.

I have to say the hardest part was finding something that fit my needs without being overly complicated. So many of the solutions I investigated were either feature limited, or overly complicated for what I needed in my business. I’ve been very happy with the solution in Autotask, and am grateful on a daily basis for having a robust solution at my back.

Now that I’ve been running Autotask for almost six months I have to say it has become an indispensible part of my companies overall approach to servicing our clientele. With its direct connection to our monitoring platform, we can manage all our clients from one interface.

Getting to the point of choosing and implementing Autotask was a long and hard road, with spending years doing tickets on paper or Quickbooks Timer, but once the implementation was complete it amazes why any IT services organization runs without a solution similar to Autotask.

The biggest thing I can agree with Josh on is to not roll your own, even if you get it perfect, it will take years to see a ROI that is in anyway meaningful (and that assumes you don’t ever need to update it).