In some ways, 2020 has felt endless. In others, it’s moved very, very quickly. And in IT specifically, the sudden arrival of a global pandemic, coupled with the switch to work-from-home computing that pandemic made necessary, have dramatically accelerated the ascent of both cloud computing and managed services. Liongard is one of many vendors that have noticed.
“Everything has been compressed,” says Joe Alapat, the managed services automation vendor’s CEO, adding that Liongard has responded in kind.
“We’re accelerating things in our roadmap as we go into next year,” he says. “What we were planning to deliver in 2022, we’re seeking to deliver in 2021.”
All of those changes will align with one of the three ways partners tell Liongard in surveys, reviews, and elsewhere that its flagship product, called Roar, helps them most: standardization, security, and scale.
Standardization, according to Alapat, is about automatically collecting status and configuration data from across a client environment, centralizing it, and then presenting it in ways that make acting on it easier for technicians.
“We’re taking out all of the manual human intervention and the chance for error,” he says. “That’s something that is challenging to do when you have a complex service model, like a managed service provider, or you’ve got this portfolio of systems that you have to manage that might not always be the same set of systems per customer because they continue to add new technologies.”
Deeper integration with third-party reporting tools is an example of how Liongard aims to provide further standardization assistance. “We’re going to continue to improve the internal reporting capabilities of the MSP to allow them to think in batch to solve things across their full customer base,” Alapat says, noting that Roar already feeds in-depth information to ConnectWise’s BrightGauge reporting platform.
Integration with additional RMM systems represents another opportunity to help MSPs standardize by enabling them to view and act on information about cloud-based applications. “More and more, the end customer is going to be using SaaS platforms,” Alapat says. “We think there’s a huge value proposition here for us to be able to act as a bridge, to work hand in hand with the RMM platforms to actually provide what I would consider net new value when you think about accessibility and visibility into SaaS.”
Roar, he notes, already integrates with Kaseya’s RMM system among others and will soon interoperate with Datto RMM, NinjaRMM, and SolarWinds N-central too. Integration with ConnectWise Automate is on the roadmap for the future.
Security, a priority for Liongard since its founding in 2015, will be an area of accelerated development going forward too, according to Alapat. “Once we have all this data on all of the systems, we can identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses that exist in that environment, and we should start to identify those vulnerabilities in ways that are clearer and more concise,” he says.
Liongard will also be adding integrations with more security solutions, like its recently introduced tie-in with SentinelOne’s endpoint detection and response solution.
The increased focus on scale in Liongard’s roadmap reflects the realization it has arrived at in recent months that it’s best and most devoted partners tend to be MSPs that need scalable tools to accommodate rapidly swelling client rolls. “Growth-oriented MSPs are our sweet spot,” Alapat says. “That’s where the investment in automation ultimately pays off.”
To accommodate frequently voiced requests among the largest of Liongard’s high-growth partners, the company has an integration with ServiceNow’s IT management platform coming by early 2021. “Our ability to integrate to ServiceNow is a clear indicator that we don’t see a glass ceiling and that we’re looking to service managed service providers of any size,” Alapat says.
Like Liongard, many MSPs view scale and standardization as increasingly critical competitive strategies.
