Autotask Doubles VARStreet’s User Base
Roughly two months after Autotask acquired VARStreet, the online product sourcing system is showing momentum with solutions providers. To wit: VARStreet’s user base has doubled in the past six weeks or so, according to Autotask Chief Marketing Officer Bob Vogel. Here are some more insights, based on an email exchange with Vogel.
First, a little background: As you may recall, The VAR Guy was somewhat skeptical when Autotask acquired VARStreet back in March 2010. Sure, VARStreet is a well-known platform that helps VARs to plug into distributor systems, manage product purchases and automate time-intensive tasks. But as an independent company, VARStreet never quite lived up to its potential. One prime indicator: VARStreet’s Website seemed to be stuck in Web 1.0 mode — lacking any significant updates since 2006, a sure sign that the company was struggling.
Autotask stepped into the picture in late 2009, started to negotiate a VARStreet buyout, and announced the deal in March 2010. At the recent Autotask Community Live conference (April 18-20, 2010), more than half of attendees indicated that they planned to leverage VARStreet. To further accelerate that demand, Autotask this week pushed out a version of VARStreet that is embedded within the Autotask PSA (Professional Services Automation) platform.
“That’s now in limited release, and we’ll make it available to the general user base (and new users who want it) in about two weeks,” said Vogel. “In terms of numbers sold, we’ve doubled the pre-existing VARStreet customer base in just six weeks. Ingram Seismic has added VARStreet to their product line and are starting to sell it as well.”
There’s also an e-commerce story here, since many solutions providers leverage VARStreet to build their own online stores. Once a VAR’s online store is up and running, the average site is moving between US$10,000 and US$20,000 per month in product sales, Vogel adds.
Still, VARStreet faces market competition. A few cases in point: Quotewerks and Quosal both have proven momentum with VARs and MSPs. And CNet Channel Online continues to attract some attention from VARs that want e-procurement and sales quoting tools.
Meanwhile, Autotask continues to promote synergies between VARStreet (product sales automation) and its traditional Autotask SaaS platform (for services automation). In April, Autotask Go! and Autotask Pro (the company’s two flagship PSA offerings) generated Autotask’s biggest sales month in the company’s history, Vogel says.
Changing Competitive Landscape
As The VAR Guy has pointed out, these are evolutionary times for PSA software providers. While Autotask celebrates apparent success with VARStreet, rival ConnectWise is gaining momentum with the ConnectWise Capital investment in LabTech Software, a remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform that positions itself against Kaseya. And to The VAR Guy’s surprise, he’s hearing from more and more MSPs that are signing up for LabTech.
You’ll find that complete LabTech story over on MSPmentor.
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Thanks for the posting VAR Guy. We are thrilled with the success of VARStreet for more than the obvious reasons. We see it giving total customer influence back the VARS. As a former MSP owner myself, I remember giving up a share of the customers IT budget because I wasn’t equipped to provide products under $2K without losing money on the time to source, quote and sometimes RMA. Now VARs can still focus on high margin services without giving up a % of the customers IT spend or relationship. Where was this last year and how come I didn’t know about it!?! 😉
Mark Crall, Exec. Dir. of Biz Dev @ Autotask
Mark: Never a need to thank The VAR Guy… Our resident blogger has always understood VARStreet’s value. But never quite saw VARStreet execute/live up to expectations under previous ownership…
-TVG
The VarStreet platform (as of 06/2010) has a great many issues that still need to be fixed before any VAR decides to go live with this to any customer.
Simple things like getting price feeds to work correctly can take weeks for the India based VarStreet support team to get working correctly – if they work at all.
We’ve found thousands of items that show zero cost to the customer due to mistakes in VarStreet’s import of the various price files from the distributors.
This platform may eventually be ironed out and work correctly but this should be considered early Beta software (at best). It’s hardly ready for a prime time rollout by any VAR at this point.
Doug: The VAR Guy has reached out to Autotask to get you some perspectives. Stay tuned…
In the meantime are you a VARStreet user or rival?
-TVG
Hey, Doug…
I’ve been using VARStreet for more than a year, and it’s been working fine for us… and I can tell you that since Autotask has taken over, we’re already seeing an uptick in the pace of the new enhancements.
I’m not sure where you’re coming with this post. If you have support issues, you should take them right to Autotask.
I have heard that they generated a huge amount of interest when they re-launched the product in April, and you may have been caught in that initial big wave. I also heard that there was a bit of a back-log getting implemented, but they’re hiring more people to handle the demand.
But I can tell you that when we were implemented, I remember the VARStreet folks told us that some of the provisioning depends on the distributor response in setting up the feeds for individual reseller accounts. It should take 5-10 business days if it involves multiple distributors.
I also think some of the problems you are reporting are probably more training issues on your part than problems with the software. For example on the zero-cost thing, the VARStreet Back Office shows every single product that is carried by every distributor. You only get prices for the products that are included in your specific feeds… but if you have a storefront set up for your customers, the ONLY products they can see are the ones that you have pricing, and it displays the pricing based on the rules you have set up.
VARStreet is an amazing product. Sure, it definitely has some things that could be improved… what software doesn’t? I’ve already seen Autotask fix a few things that were bothering me about the software, and I know they will continue to aggressively work to improve it. But the best thing they did was repackage the software with new pricing for it makes it a no-brainer purchase today.