Tigerpaw Software Inc., of Bellevue, Neb., today offered the audience at its 2016 partner conference a first look at Tigerpaw 16.1, the latest edition of the company’s flagship PSA solution.
Though Tigerpaw will officially announce the launch of version 16.1 on Monday, attendees at its partner conference, which is currently underway in Omaha, Neb., gained access to the new release this week. It will become available to other Tigerpaw customers in mid-November.
The new system features enhanced project management capabilities, including functionality for defining project sub-phases, attaching multiple accounts to a single project, and billing either individual companies in a multi-account project or a parent company. Users can also define and automatically trigger workflow events under pre-defined conditions, such as a project going over budget or falling behind schedule.
Those changes come in response to requests from growing providers of IT, telco, and other services with increasingly sophisticated and varied needs.
“Our clients have matured,” said Tigerpaw president and CEO James Foxall (pictured) in an interview with ChannelPro. “The idea was to take what we already had and allow our guys to work with much bigger, much more complex, much more expensive projects.”
Widening the Tigerpaw solution’s capabilities is as much an objective for version 16.1 as deepening its project management functionality, however. The system includes a modernized API based on the REST protocol that’s designed to nurture a wave of new and deeper integrations with third-party solutions by enabling developers to link their products to the Tigerpaw platform without assistance from Tigerpaw itself.
“The whole idea with that is to make it as hands-off from our perspective as we can,” said Foxall, who noted during a keynote address this morning that RMM software maker Naverisk, BDR vendors Datto Inc. and StorageCraft Technology Corp., and documentation specialist IT Glue are all either utilizing or planning to take advantage of that capability.
The new API currently provides access to sales and customer data. Tigerpaw plans to make service order information available to outside solutions shortly as well.
“It is our objective to get everything in the product put into our API,” said Foxall during his keynote. “It really opens up the integration landscape.”
Also included in Tigerpaw 16.1 is new support for “multi-metered” contracts. That’s functionality likely to be especially useful for managed print providers, who typically bill differently for color versus monochrome devices, for example, or for different tiers of service.
The move to accommodate that requirement comes as the managed print and managed services channels slowly but steadily converge into one. During his keynote, Foxall urged MSPs to regard that trend as both a threat and potential source of incremental revenue.
“You’re going to see them knocking on your clients’ doors,” he warned of managed print firms. “There’s also a tremendous opportunity for all of you to add manage print to your practice.”
Foxall showcased upgrades to Tigerpaw’s mobile app during his presentation this morning as well. The newest release, which will ship about a week after the core version 16.1 application, includes a “password keeper” that lets roaming technicians securely retrieve a client’s network and other passwords, as well as a new document viewer that provides remote access to contracts and other key forms.
Conference-goers received a sneak peek at future milestones on the Tigerpaw roadmap today as well, including a new cloud-based edition of the Tigerpaw desktop application that will arrive in the first quarter of 2017.
In addition, Foxall demoed a forthcoming real-time IT product browsing function that will let users view, compare, and order hardware and peripherals for their clients from multiple suppliers. That feature, which is expected to reach market approximately three to six months from now, will be available at no additional cost to customers who utilize the Tigerpaw One licensing option, which provides usage rights to Tigerpaw’s entire family of core software modules and add-ons for a flat per-user monthly fee.
Introduced on a preliminary basis at last year’s partner event, Tigerpaw One officially became available to the vendor’s entire customer base this week. Foxall emphasized the advantages of switching to Tigerpaw One during his keynote yesterday.
The 2016 Tigerpaw Conference concludes tomorrow morning.
