New Autotask Products Further Enable Service Providers
Providers can assign service tickets to any partner on the Web, and monitor and manage the work on the tickets in real time.
By Chris Talbot
Autotask is rolling out two new products to help service providers better handle their managed services and collaborate with their partners. The announcements were made at the company’s first user conference–the Autotask CommunITy Live User Conference being held on March 30th and 31st in Nashville, Tenn.
“We’re doing a pretty sizable conference for us. It’s our first conference where we’re bringing a huge number of our users all into one place,” said Bob Godgart, CEO of Autotask.
With people coming from Europe, Australia, the Middle East and throughout the U.S. and Canada, Autotask took the opportunity to launch new products and host educational sessions on its products.
According to Godgart, the new products are game-changers for Autotask. All of the new products revolve around transforming service providers’ services relationships, he explained.
The Autotask Outsource Management module was designed to be a universal outsourcing system for service providers.
“It allows us to send data to other Autotask systems, [and] to subcontractors that don’t have a system. It has a module to send an outsource to networks like IMOnsite or OnForce,” Godgart said.
The module enables service providers to assign service tickets to any partner with the ability to connect to the Internet, even if that partner doesn’t use Autotask. Then they can monitor and manage the work being done on those tickets in real time. From a single dashboard interface, the service provider can get visibility into all the IT services work being outsourced to partners, and that information can be sorted by status or by subcontractor.
It also allows partners to set up the tool to easily send notifications and e-mails about outsourced work to partners, who can then accept or turn down the work, Godgart said.
“The ability to track it all on a dashboard is unique,” he said.
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The other new product Autotask announced was Taskfire, a co-managed service desk that connects the internal ticketing system to the solution provider’s service desk.
“This is sort of a way that the service provider can now deliver a slice of their Autotask or essentially an internal IT system to go with that client access into the customer. And it’s tied directly into their system,” Godgart said.
Included in Taskfire is a workflow automation engine that manages the flow of tickets between internal and external IT resources based on specified criteria. It enables solution providers to deliver a range of new, supplemental co-managed services, he said.
“It’s important for a couple of reasons. One is it’s a type of product that allows the service provider to really innovate and win some new business,” Godgart said. It provides new tools so they can create new service models.
Additionally, solution providers can also use it as a prospecting tool with existing customers, he said.
“We’re really looking at these as wonderful enablers. We think in the future the service providers will have much larger expanded services portfolios, and they can’t do all this stuff alone,” Godgart said.
This article originally appeared in eChannelLine.
