IT Glue: New Integrations Reflect Commitment to Open Platform

IT Glue, the documentation platform provider, announced Tuesday new deep ticket integrations with ConnectWise and Autotask, adding to the growing list of PSA providers it supports, including Vorex, Pulseway, TigerPaw and Kaseya, which acquired IT Glue last year.

IT Glue, like much of the industry, is heavily touting its open, platform-agnostic API. The company recently published an Open Platform Manifesto, penned by VP of product Luis Giraldo to expand on the ideal.

“IT Glue is not a single-tool company, however, and we’re most definitely not in a single-tool industry,” reads the manifesto. “We leverage the power and depth of dozens of amazing best-in-class software titles and apps every day, and we work tirelessly to link them together to support our hyper-connected needs and realities.”

“Do more with less” is IT Glue’s mantra these days, and it applies both to its customer mission as well as its internal strategy for expanding its reach. In late 2017, the company introduced its public API, which has accelerated the number of vendor-driven integrations for the IT Glue platform and spawned a community of automation and scripting experts busy developing tools and solutions.

IT Glue’s Luis Giraldo

We sat down with Giraldo to talk about the new integrations, how the Kaseya acqusition has changed things and why he thinks IT Glue has become such a widely used tool in the MSP stack.

Channel Futures: Sometimes it feels like I blinked, and suddenly every partner I know is using IT Glue. To what do you ascribe your popularity?

Luis Giraldo: Over the last few years, there’s definitely been a drive to “do more with less” as the pace of our digital lives increases. MSPs are also maturing at a much faster rate than before and realizing way sooner in their evolution just how critical documentation is to their ability to not only scale, but to deliver truly enlightened service and support. It certainly doesn’t hurt that IT Glue has been a trailblazer in the documentation arena, but that also came with a long learning period while we initially set out to educate the market on this documentation “thing.”

CF: How have you scaled to meet that demand? Are your Github community and open API part of that strategy?

LG: IT Glue was architected with scale in mind. We grew very quickly from 2015-2018 (20 to 100 staff) to ensure we met the demand, and I’m glad to see that we’ve been able to not only keep up, but also continue innovating and driving the ideas that have made IT Glue the leading platform in this space. In the last year, we’ve really ramped up our communication efforts around automation and our API, and we’re seeing MSPs responding with some amazing functionality.

We rolled out a public Github repository, and we’re starting to see stellar engagement and involvement from our user base at large. At our first installment of Glue X last September, one of our partners showed PowerShell scripts leveraging our API that reduced their new customer on-boarding time by 70 percent, which is absolutely incredible — all these scripts our housed in Github now, and ready to be used by any of our partners that want to leverage this kind of automation in their own business as well.

CF: How has the acquisition by Kaseya impacted operations?

LG: More than “impacted,” the key word is “helped.” Kaseya is nuts for the instrumentation aspects of the business, and it’s been great for us to get to “grow up” within this amazing framework as well. I can confidently say that the depth and meaningfulness of our customer engagement is easily tenfold what it used to be, all while having a more focused view of the business and where we’re headed. The future is most definitely exciting!