The Right Tool For The Job
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).
May 13th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Hey Scott,
Thanks for reading our blog. I am not sure how long ago you started your company but I can agree that five years ago it was hard to find anything specific to our industry.
Today Autotask is everywhere on the internet and right behind them you will find Connectwise. Why a provider would not leverage the experience of providers such as yourself in finding the right tool is beyond me….
Cheers,
Josh
May 13th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Hey, Scott –
We’re also amazed at the number of IT solution providers who are still “in the dark” about solutions like Autotask, even though we’ve been marketing our brains out exclusively in this market, and this market only! We’re at all the major trade shows like CompTIA, XChange, Ingram VTN, to name a few; we’re a major sponsor of every IT service group we can find, including MSP Alliance, Ascii Group, ITA, MSP Partners, MSPSN, SMB Nation, and others; we attend lots of regional Microsoft SBSC groups; we’re partnered with every major vendor that IT guys deal with, including Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, plus all of the MSP tool vendors; we advertise in the key trade magazines, like CRN, VAR Business, Business Solutions, etc.; we run webinars like every other week, and send e-mail reminders out to everyone who visits our web site and fills out a form (whew!)
Yet, despite all of this, our biggest competitors today is inertia and ignorance. I think there are about 100,000 companies out there doing some kind of outsourced technology services — many of them with 5 or fewer employees. I guess they don’t think they need a purpose-built solution to help them run their business, since the owners tend to BE the business. But, while we do sell our software to some fairly large companies with hundreds of employees, the vast majority of our customers are really small. And like you said, Scott, it takes them a long time to finally come around to realize that they can be a lot more efficient, provide a lot better customer service, get a lot more work done without increasing staff, and in the end, make a lot more money.
I’m glad you’re still “ahead of the curve.” But our user base is nor nearly 20,000 and growing fast.
With that in mind, we are now working on the next generation of our software that will facilate collaboration — allowing our users to co-manage system with their larger clients, to easily out-task tickets and projects to subcontractors, and to seamlessly integrate with service networks like OnForce and IMSN.
Thanks for being a great customer and spreading the word!
– Bob V.
Bob Vogel
Chief Marketing Officer
Autotask Corporation
May 16th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Hey Scott,
I have to agree with all that have been said. At CommitCRM we offer a CRM, PSA and Billing solution which was designed specifically for small to mid sized IT services businesses.
We currently serve thousands of IT professionals, however, despite all of the efforts, many IT service providers are still not aware that solutions such as CommitCRM, or the other tools mentioned above, exist.
Maayan Porat
Commit Business Solutions
http://www.CommitCRM.com
May 16th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Frankly I’m not surprised that a lot of providers haven’t heard of solutions like Autotask or CommitCRM. When I went with Calyptix to SMB Nation in NY this year, I can’t tell you the number of people I talked to that are still running the integrated ISA firewall with SBS server.
It really surprised me that so many people are happy using what I would consider a inferior solution. But from what I could tell, it was mostly smaller shops staffed with old school techs that don’t want to change their ways.
Maybe I just find it odd since I would be considered a Gen Y person, and am always looking for change and the next great thing. Frankly I can only hope all these companies will begin moving to MSP platforms or going out of business, because the customers deservce all the benefits that a quality MSP can provide.
-Scott