A single growing pain or real problems? ConnectWise apparently is working to restore its hosted PSA service. Problems seem to have started mid-day October 26 and there are indications full service won't be restored until Oct. 28. Here are some of the details.
Updated 10:49 a.m. eastern, Oct. 28: ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini informs me that service was restored to the 198 affected partners at 10:30 a.m. eastern on Oct. 28.
Updated 10:54 p.m. eastern, Oct. 27: Please see ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini's comments below, in which he clarifies the scope and status of the outage.
My original Oct. 27 blog entry resumes here:
I've got a note and voicemail into ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini and COO Santo Cannone. As soon as I get a reply I will share some more details.
In the meantime you can find some of the blow-by-blow out on Twitter, where hosted ConnectWise customers like Mike Joseph started describing problems mid-day Oct. 26. The chatter soon spilled over to Larry Walsh's blog, where he reported:
ConnectWise says about 100 of its Cloud customers will remain without service until Wednesday morning following a major hardware failure in its Web-based service infrastructure on Tuesday.
Bad Timing
The outage is a case of awful timing for ConnectWise, which is hosting a major partner conference in Orlando Nov. 4-6.In recent months, ConnectWise has somewhat altered its messaging and pricing to promote Hosted and SaaS expertise -- taking an aggressive stance against rival Autotask.
While Autotask has long promoted itself as a pure SaaS and cloud option, the vast majority of ConnectWise deployments involve on-premise engagements.
No doubt, on-premise software companies and even Internet-centric giants have hit bumps from time to time when introducing expanded cloud and SaaS services. Microsoft suffered a storage cloud black eye earlier this month. And Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service (S3) has suffered high-profile outages.
In ConnectWise's case the affected user base apparently is limited to a small percentage of users (since most ConnectWise customers are on-premise) but you can bet the SaaS folks at Autotask are watching the competitive situation closely.
What caused the ConnectWise outage? I hesitate to speculate, and will wait to hear an official explanation from ConnectWise. But the timing certainly hurts ahead of the ConnectWise Partner Summit.
Follow MSPmentor via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; and Twitter. And sign up for our Enewsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center. Plus, check out more MSP voices at www.MSPtweet.com.
