ConnectWise has introduced a new edition of its ITBOOST documentation system, a new direction for its BrightGauge reporting tool, and a new underlying platform for its entire family of products.
The software and service provider for MSPs described those and other updates at its IT Nation Connect conference, which is taking place online this week.
The new platform, named Fusion, is designed to link ConnectWise’s 18 product families more closely by enabling them to share common data stores, reporting tools, and network discovery engines. “What we want to do is start to centralize those services, reinvent them, reimagine them, and then make them available out to those different product lines,” says Jeff Bishop, chief product officer at ConnectWise.
Fusion draws heavily on the architecture that unified RMM, BDR, and security solutions from Continuum, the managed services line-of-business vendor ConnectWise bought a year ago along with ITBOOST. “Now what we’re doing is extending those same services out to the PSA and to [ConnectWise] Automate and ITBOOST and [ConnectWise] Control,” Bishop says.
Version 4 of ITBOOST, which ConnectWise officially unveiled today, offers performance improvements the company has been working on since last year’s acquisition. “As we started bringing them into some of our larger MSPs in our community, we were seeing that the experience and the page loads weren’t exactly what we wanted, so we put a big architectural push behind it to really clean that up,” Bishop says.
The new release also offers automated asset discovery functionality via integrations with about a dozen vendors, including Microsoft, Cisco, and Amazon Web Services. Further integrations are in the works, as are closer ties to ConnectWise’s PSA and RMM solutions that will let users view documentation about clients and devices without pivoting from one tool to another. “That saves you time, which makes you more profitable and then lets you get better customer success,” Bishop says.
ConnectWise also outlined plans this morning to equip BrightGauge with functionality that will enable users to benchmark themselves against anonymous aggregated data from the entire ConnectWise partner base.
“How do we maybe help somebody who’s trying to go from half a million to $1 million, or $1 million to five?” Bishops asks. “We know what a lot of these partners have done to try to grow their businesses, and we can provide that information back out to the MSP community.”
A pilot program for the new reporting feature gets started this month. “We want to make sure that we step into this carefully, making sure that our customers feel safe and understand how we’re utilizing this information, as well as how it will be displayed,” Bishop says.
ConnectWise has had two RMM solutions, ConnectWise Automate and ConnectWise Command, since the Continuum acquisition, and according to Bishop will continue offering them separately to meet varying MSP preferences. Partners with a “do-it-yourself” mentality, he says, generally prefer Automate, while companies that like outsourcing NOC and other functions usually prefer Command.
Fusion, however, will help ConnectWise gradually reduce the distinctions between those platforms over time. “They’re going to start to feel like the same product,” Bishop says. Already, he notes, Command users can utilize the ConnectWise Control remote access solution, just like Automate users. Efforts are underway to make Command’s help desk services available to Automate users as well.
Also at IT Nation Connect today, ConnectWise announced that it has acquired SOC and SIEM service providers Perch Security and StratoZen, in a bid to help MSPs consolidate data from multiple sources and study it for threats automatically.
