The low-profile business management software provider hopes to build upon its 2018 growth.

Kris Blackmon, Head of Channel Communities

February 21, 2019

3 Min Read
Fiscal growth
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It may not be as big a name as ConnectWise or Kaseya, but business management software provider HarmonyPSA has high hopes of catching up fast, and its 2018 fiscal results, reported this week, show that it’s on a roll. Last year, Harmony exceeded its growth projections for revenues, customer reach, product advancement and profitability.

Steve Duckworth, CEO of Harmony Business Systems, says that competing in a space dominated by two or three big players hasn’t been easy, especially when those competitors have “rich, complex platforms to offer.” It’s a tough sell, but 2018 saw the company seeing its long road map come to fruition after learning some lessons over the last several years.

Steve-Duckworth-Harmony-PSA-2018.jpg

HarmonyPSA’s Steve Duckworth

“The earlier versions of software were more opinionated (dogmatic and restrictive for the range of use cases it may be called upon to support) than was helpful or necessary,” says Duckworth. “We worked with our customers to provide increasing options for the way the software can be used so that they can adapt it more easily to the wide range of working practices we see in the marketplace.”

The evolution from break/fix to managed services and consulting in areas like cybersecurity provided a prime opportunity for Harmony to make inroads into the PSA space by focusing on flexibility and ease of configuration. The software underwent five big revisions last year and now features what Harmony calls “first-ever types of functionality for PSA software” developed with a dedication to “universality of function.”

“So, when we developed notifications for example, we applied it to everything, not just tickets,” he says. “When we produced our process-driven Kanban boards, again, we made them universal, not restricted in any way.”

Other developments include a multilingual build that uses tag abstraction and resource files to add a language rather than code changes so new languages can easily be added without increasing testing loads. The software’s workflows are path-based and can incorporate conditional checklists, and a team-based resource management allows drag-and-drop re-planning to update team workload allocations in real time.

To now, Harmony hasn’t had a high profile. It’s dumped its money into R&D instead of marketing, but lately it’s been opening up more fully to the market, and customers are clearly taking note. Harmony grew its annual recurring revenue by 50 percent over the past six months, and that’s slated to double during this fiscal year ending June 2019. The company doubled the number of countries it serves, and its customer base grew by 70 percent last year.

Duckworth says its growing market share can in part be credited to that break/fix-managed services shift — right place, right time. That created an opportunity for it to compete on nuanced, flexible architecture built around contracts.

“In a break/fix world, more tickets meant more revenue — and tech utilization was the only metric you needed. With all-you-can-eat contracts, prevention is the key, and fewer tickets mean more profit,” he explains. “So, the fire department has become an insurance company. Also, in the old days, you didn’t care much who your clients were as long as they …

… paid. Now customer-level profitability is the new metric to run a successful business and to price service correctly.”

Harmony’s theme for 2019 is “collaboration between its partners and their customers.” To that end, it says this year it will enable enable sharing ticket workflows and allowing customers to run their own tickets on partners’ behalf, as well as sharing project work with both customers and sub-contractors with whom MSAs have alliances.

The business management software for MSPs market is growing very crowded, with new players emerging all the time, and smaller shops pushing hard to grow their share of wallet. 2019 will likely see a definitive gap open up between providers that will lead the space in 2020 and beyond and those that will remain niche players or be snapped up by private equity or competitive buyouts. It’ll be interesting to watch Harmony push to repeat its 2018 performance and attempt to cement its seat at the table.

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About the Author(s)

Kris Blackmon

Head of Channel Communities, Zift Solutions

Kris Blackmon is head of channel communities at Zift Solutions. She previously worked as chief channel officer at JS Group, and as senior content director at Informa Tech and project director of the MSP 501er Community. Blackmon is chair of CompTIA's Channel Development Advisory Council and operates KB Consulting. You may follow her on LinkedIn and @zift on X.

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