“It’s nice to see them focusing on the needs of MSPs. In recent years, they have focused on major trends. This is a return to basics in a good way,” says Dustin Bolander, founder, partner and CIO of Clear Guidance Partners.

Jeff Bishop, ConnectWise’s chief product officer, said the company’s new Asio platform is ready to realize the vision of its full stack of products managed through a single interface.

“Our priority is to deliver innovation, product stability, ease of use and an open ecosystem, all of which are crucial to our partnership with you and your continued success, and we know that we cannot relying solely on a vision,” Bishop said. audience during a presentation at the IT Nation 2024 annual business show.

Dustin Bolander, founder, partner and CIO of Austin, Texas-based Clear Guidance Partners, a longtime ConnectWise partner, said from what he’s seen so far, the Asio platform is a return to form for the company.

“It’s nice to see them focusing on the needs of MSPs,” Bolander said. “In recent years, they have focused on major trends. It’s a return to basics in a good way.

(RELATED: ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo Says Asio Is ‘Primetime Ready’)

Asio is ConnectWise’s vision for a unified platform where MSPs can run all of their products and manage their clients’ digital assets from one place. The technologically ambitious project debuted at IT Nation 2021 and has been in development ever since.

ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo previously told CRN that crossing the finish line was a top priority for him and ConnectWise private equity owner Thoma Bravo.

Rivelo said Asio received about $70 million in investment and ConnectWise was willing to spend whatever it took to make it a success.

“We just put PSA on the platform and we’ve had access to it for a while now,” Rivelo told the MSP crowd at IT Nation on Wednesday, adding that of the 3,000 MSPs using the platform, 1 000 use the newly integrated PSA. , which he says is still in early access while they test it.

During his presentation, Bishop said the team that designed Asio kept in mind the ease of use of the platform by the MSP.

“Asio is our enterprise platform purpose-built for the MSP community that centralizes your products, your data, provides a common user experience, and removes much of the manual work you need to do today for employee onboarding , customers and integrating disparate solutions,” Bishop said.

What’s new at Asio?

Bishop said that within Asio, the product has a PSA, RMM, ConnectWise Security 360 vulnerability management, data protection, robotic process automation, dozens and hundreds of integrations and more than 150 shared services that all of these products benefit from.

Bishop said there are thousands of users worldwide and RMM is used on 2.2 million endpoints. He also said Asio is adopting an API-first development mentality to keep the ecosystem open and scalable for partners.

But it goes well beyond the products inside, Bishop said, because Asio improves the entire MSP user experience.

“Over the last four or five months, we’ve made a lot of different improvements. We created custom actions, webhooks for triggers, the ability to add variables and deadlines. We can integrate robots into workflows,” he told the audience.
“Look, this is a huge change from what was around last year, and I hope you get a chance to go out there and test this out.”

Why it matters for MSPs

In the solution provider industry, much of the code that makes up the operational software that MSPs use to run their business is outdated. In many cases, it has been updated as needed, mixed with other products through acquisitions, and then leveraged and patched repeatedly.

What ConnectWise is trying to do with Asio is bring all of its tools together into a platform built with modern code that delivers a superior MSP experience (all the tools needed to run your business in one unified place) while removing the constraints linked to their old software.

“Asio is more than just packaging that launches the different product lines,” Bishop said. “It’s a real consolidated platform. It delivers an experience where products and services are designed to use the same fundamental elements to enable our partners to evolve and grow faster than they ever thought possible.

What does this mean for frontline engineers?

Bishop said Asio makes onboarding and training new employees significantly simpler.

“You no longer need to map businesses, locations and devices across all the different disparate products in our portfolio,” he said.

Bishop said Asio removes the need to match a user’s security access rights across multiple different products.

“For a lot of MSPs I talk to, this is extremely difficult to do,” he said. “These products, with our new centralized service, simplify that, so it’s just one place where you can do all of that.”

Bishop said Asio also acts as a hub for hyperautomation, which he said is like a combination of AI and automation that ConnectWise is working to deploy across its entire product suite to enable engineers to communicate with products.

“This is a next-generation AI solution that has been integrated into almost every product in our portfolio, and it continues to evolve and grow as we make it accessible within from Asio,” Bishop said.

Bots and digital agents

Bishop described how users can create and integrate automated processes and bots into their workflows, creating one during a live demo.

“All you have to do is go in and name it, describe it, then go in and add your own script into the system, then you can register that bot, which can then be used in Sidekick , inside a chatbot, in the PSA or in our workflow engine, whatever works for you and your business processes,” he said.

In looking for ways to improve MSP profitability, Bishop said ConnectWise has focused on finding ways to automate the onboarding and offboarding of employees and prospects, since MSPs manage this not just for them themselves, but for their customers.

“We’ve started building our own out-of-the-box automations that will give MSPs a template you can use for onboarding, opt-out, and more that we’ll be releasing throughout this year. . One of the main areas we make sure to focus on is the onboard and offboard experience, as we know that this takes a lot of time for your various teams.

Build it and share it

Bishop said that within Asio, ConnectWise has its own drag-and-drop workflow design engine that has been simplified for users and now has enhanced features, including the ability to create webhooks for users. triggers, adding delays and the ability to add variables. .

Bishop said one of IT Nation’s priorities is sharing best practices. The Asio platform will therefore allow MSPs to share their best creations with their team or with all ConnectWise users.

“Beyond all of that, we’re also making sure that you can start sharing what you’re building with the community, whether it’s digital workers, workflows, or bots,” he declared. “Our community concept now allows you to create and share them with other MSPs in your family, or with the entire IT Nation community.