If a managed service provider prefers using the ticketing solution from one vendor but the remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool from another, it can be difficult to develop a system where the two seamlessly integrate.
It’s with that in mind that Kaseya announced today it is increasing the level of integration between its VSA RMM solution and ConnectWise Manage PSA. Assuming the integration works as advertised, MSPs and IT service providers should welcome the news. The new integration arrives as ConnectWise prepares to kick off IT Nation 2017 later this week in Orlando, Fla.
Kaseya and ConnectWise occasionally take swipes at each other, but their continued connections between RMM and PSA systems is critical important to thousands of MSPs.
“(MSPs) don’t want to be told that they must buy everything from one vendor and they want that flexibility,” Kaseya's Chief Product Officer Mike Puglia tells ChannelE2E. “As we see the consolidation in the market and platforms looking a bit more closed, we believe the ones that are going to win on the MSP side and the vendor side, are those that are open.”
When it comes to Kaseya’s relationship with ConnectWise, Puglia says the two companies remain “fierce competitors in the market with each other,” but there remains a high customer crossover. Making sure those customers can move seamlessly between the tools is important. “That’s the most important thing to our customers, that we have technologies that work well together,” he says.
Puglia adds that MSPs who succeed want choice, no matter which vendor they use. Kaseya is concentrating on making that choice an easy one. “That’s who we want to be,” he says. “The MSP openness vendor.”
For its part, ConnectWise has vowed to keep its APIs (application programming interfaces) open, and multiple third-party integrations will likely surface at this week's IT Nation.
The Enhancements
The Kaseya PSA Connector creates an integration between VSA and ConnectWise Manage, Kaseya asserts. The new features are designed to reduce the time it takes for technicians to resolve issues, benefiting customer service and lowering costs.
According to Puglia, there are five key changes to these latest enhancements:
1. Integration has been expanded from solely on-prem solutions to the company’s cloud SaaS environment.
“Whether you’re on-prem or in the cloud, it doesn’t matter,” says Puglia. “Use the deployment that is best for your business. We support either.
2. Enhanced de-duplication and consolidation of tickets.
“We’ve added the ability inside of Kaseya’s VSA to have some intelligence to say ‘these issues are related or they’re multiple issues on the same machine’ and consolidate that into one ticket on the ConnectWise side,” asserts Puglia. “So the technician gets one view of what’s happening in the incident.”
3. Kaseya custom audit to ConnectWise configuration item synchronization. This gives technicians detailed endpoint information to lower mean time to repair (MTTR).
4. Automated ticket time entry synchronization, which enables MSPs to both accurately capture activity and bill customers.
5. One-click Kaseya Live Connect and remote control from within a ConnectWise Manage ticket, providing real-time endpoint connectivity to speed troubleshooting.
Cooperating and Competing
Although the MSP software market has largely consolidated around five rival companies (Autotask-Datto, ConnectWise, Continuum, Kaseya and SolarWinds MSP), each of those five companies has generally vowed to maintain cross-company software integrations.
