IT Glue Pushes Beyond $25 Million Annual Recurring Revenue
Chris Day
Within the IT market, the ‘sexy’ topics typically are security, cloud services, DevOps, Big Data, IoT and a handful of other areas. But sometimes, it’s the ‘sleepy’ topics that quietly make the biggest impact.
A case in point: IT Glue, which develops a documentation platform for MSPs, has blown past the $25 million annual recurring revenue mark, according to CEO Chris Day. That’s a particularly impressive figure considering the company launched in 2013, and sells primarily to MSPs in the SMB sector.
IT Glue’s core purpose is simply stated — and trademarked — in two words: ‘Freeing Minds.’ The payoff for MSPs, IT Glue says, goes something like this:
“By removing the burden of memorizing processes and documentation, we allow your people to focus on more valuable and inspiring initiatives. We release your leadership to focus on growing and improving your business, rather than worrying about whether information is complete or accessible.”
Plenty of folks have attempted to crack the MSP documentation code over the years. For instance, ConnectWise in 2013 invested in BizDox, and more recently Passportal has expanded from its successful password management capabilities to documentation.
IT Glue: Continued Growth, New Capabilities
Still, IT Glue has been marching forward at a rapid pace. Overall, the company is growing about 9 percent month over month and now serves 4,000 MSPs. Moreover, 200 additional MSPs are moving onto the platform each month, Day says.
At the same time, IT Glue has ramped up to 90 employees — including an executive team and key staff members who have allowed Day to step back a bit from the grueling business travel that’s typical in the MSP software sector.
Meanwhile, R&D also continues. The latest capability involves Runbooks — which allow MSPs to export IT Glue Data into a PDF. MSPs can use Runbooks to create asset documentation for disaster recovery, compliance, reporting, and project/offboarding purposes, among other use cases.
Amid IT Glue’s rapid expansion and new capabilities, some folks have suggested the company will get acquired. However, Day remains firmly in control of the closely held technology company — and it sounds like he’s enjoying the journey as an independent company.
My MSP adopted the IT Glue platform for our client documentation in mid-2015, along with some other members of my HTG Peer Group. As an entrepreneur myself, it has been exciting to watch IT Glue grow over the past several years.
My leadership team and I feel IT Glue it’s been a good platform, and it has helped us create standardized documentation across all of our managed services clients – which has been very helpful in supporting the growth of our MSP. However, I was rather disappointed at the IT Nation conference last week when I learned the long-awaited export feature (which they are calling Runbooks) is part of their new higher-priced Enterprise plan and will not be available to my company (which is on their legacy plan) unless we significantly increase our monthly price. I understand that software vendors sometimes have to offer different plans, with some advanced features being part of a higher-price premium product. I think something like using the API features can certainly fall into this category. However, I don’t see how simply being able to create a printable copy of your documentation (for disaster recovery, compliance, reporting, etc. purposes), from a documentation system, could somehow considered to be an advantage feature? IMHO, it is not. It is a core feature that has been missing from the beginning, and it should be included in the price of the core product.
I remember several years ago when Kaseya took the approach of most of the new features for their core RMM software becoming paid add-ons, and they stopped making (significant) enhancements to their core product. In the end, they upset many members of their partner base, which led to lost customers. I hope IT Glue does not take that path. I hope they reconsider their decision regarding Runbooks, and make it part of the core product. IT Glue is a good product and a good company. I hope they continue to use an appropriate portion of the monthly fees from their paying legacy subscribers to continue to invest and enhance their core/legacy product and continue to make it even better. Just my two cents.
Lloyd: Thanks for your readership over the years and for the detailed comment. Sometimes we (ChannelE2E) fail to cover the important nuances of pricing and we should be sure to dig on that, especially when so many vendors manage pricing in different ways. I’m not knocking IT Glue, BTW; simply stating that the pricing & total cost of ownership considerations (with all vendors) demands better coverage.
Best,
-jp
Well said, Lloyd. I would add that I wouldn’t even call them runbooks. They are more client-specific documentation packages.