Autotask VARStreet: Facing an Emerging Rival?
As Autotask celebrates the buyout of VARStreet, a potential VARStreet rival seems to be gaining momentum with some solutions providers and managed services providers. Here are the details.
First, a little background: Autotask snapped up VARStreet last week. Assuming the Autotask-VARStreet business combo works as advertised, VARs and MSPs will ultimately gain a single dashboard for managing services (Autotask) and product sourcing (VARStreet). It sounds like a promising strategy and more details should emerge at the Autotask Community Live event in April 2010.
Still, VARStreet isn’t the only game in town. Solutions providers are using a range of tools to generate customer quotes and source products from distributors.
One well-known option is Quotewerks, which allows VARs to fetch real-time quotes from Ingram Micro, Synnex, Tech Data and others. More recently, Quotewerks has been writing tighter integration to the ConnectWise PSA platform — which competes with Autotask.
Looking Beyond the Obvious
Ah, yet another ConnectWise vs. Autotask showdown? Hmmm… Actually, this blog entry is about to take a turn in yet another direction.
During a few phone calls this week, solutions providers mentioned to The VAR Guy that they’re jumping from Quotewerks to Quosal — which integrates with Ingram Micro, Tech Data and D&H at no extra cost. And here’s a neat twist: Quosal also integrates with Microsoft’s SQL Azure cloud database.
True believers in Quosal include Rich Anderson, CEO of Next Level Cafe — a managed services provider that’s starting to quote more and more work. (Shameless plug: Anderson is set to speak on our Four Steps to SaaS Success webcast, April 7).
Quosal certainly isn’t an upstart. The solution has been “a work in process for about 20 years, stemming from my own experience as a VAR and vertical market systems integrator (in the retail management systems space),” says Kent McNall, CEO of Quosal. “As a sales person, sales manager, and chief executive the struggle for accurate, timely, and productive quotes AND proposals always seemed out of proportion.”
McNall says Quosal competes regularly with Quotewerks, Channel Online and VARStreet (as well as legacy Excel and Word approaches). Sales have grown 700% this quarter, and they were up 400% last quarter, McNall adds. Of course, such large percentage increases suggest Quosal’s sales figures last year likely were pretty low.
Still, a few VARs have mentioned Quosal to The VAR Guy in recent days. Sounds like the Autotask-VARStreet combo can expect some healthy competition.
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I want to echo your statement about the integrations that ConnectWise has created with both Quosal and Quotewerks. They both allow VARs to get more done/more consistently when it comes to putting out proposals and quotes. I am a Quosal user and love how they have tied it to so many other services that allow better product/item detail, online proposal/quote presentation and submission of quote/proposal info to ConnectWise. I can’t see how any VAR/MSP would be without a product like this and I look forward to Quosal and ConnectWise building an even more powerful integration.
If anyone can explain why they would migrate from QuoteWerks to Quosal I’d be interested to hear their thoughts..
To answer Jim… it’s Order Porter. Quosal’s ability to deliver quotes electronically and have them approved via a web portal was a major advantage. In addition, you can utilize the same technology internally to deliver a quote for a peer review among your staff and have the responses to the peer review captured in a thread for reference. We love it… much more efficient than our legacy systems.
Jim – we jumped from QuoteWerks to Quosal for many reasons. I agree with Dave that Order Porter is a huge advantage for Quosal. Being able to publish quotes securely online, with options if you want to add options, allows customers to up-sell themselves. They can simply click the link in their email, review the quote and options, choose what they want and electronically sign right there. Our Purchasing group can then push those orders directly to our vendors through API integration out of the box. Not to mention, Quosal by far has the absolute best ability to generate a complete and dynamic end-to-end sales proposal quickly. We struggled with QuoteWerks in trying to create a proposal look and feel. Especially when trying to tie together hardwareamp;software with project services and recurring services. We never got it done with QuoteWerks – and we tried! Our Sales Execs had to use multiple tools depending on what they were quoting. Now, with the help of Kent and his team, we were able to get exactly what we wanted – a quoting and proposal publishing tool that generates content dynamically depending on what we’re quoting, and that generates a cohesive quote summary outlining recurring charges vs. one-time charges, etc. We deal with multiple lines of business and need to integrate with both SalesForce.com and ConnectWise. You can switch back and forth within Quosal to manage opportunities in both systems. Lastly, have you ever tried to build a Dell quote in QuoteWerks? You have to manually transcribe the quote from your Dell rep into QuoteWerks to present to your customer. With Quosal, they’ve mapped the various Dell quote formats to data fields in their own application so now you just copy the quote from your email and “Paste Dell Quote” in Quosal. That’s it, the rest is done for you. And there are many more time-savers like this throughout the app.
Simply put, with some consulting from Kent and his team, Quosal is the most custom application you will get off the shelf.
Thanks for some very insightful comments.
Does this – gt; http://www.quotewerks.com/videos/support/Importing_DellEQuote_Into_QuoteWerks.wmv do the job for Dell quotes? or is your requirement more complex than ours!
I understand that QW are developing an equivalent to order porter which’ll be available over the next few months.
Admittedly, I’m a QW fanboy since about 2002 and see no reason to change.
Concurrent licencing, more Real-Time partners and less obtrusive updates swing it for me.
Anyhow, much better than Excel/Word!
While we at Autotask look forward to making it easier and more profitable for VARs, MSPs and IT solution providers to sell and procure technology products – through customized quotes or their own branded, fully-automated online stores, we are also FULLY committed to supporting our integrations with both QuoteWerks and Quosal.
Shamless plug: Our next VARStreet Demo is 3/31 http://varstreet.autotask.com/contact/index.htm
Mark
Mark: The VAR Guy welcomes shameless plugs (such as yours) when they’re properly framed and related to the subject matter. Thanks for giving readers a bit more background about Autotask’s strategy. The VAR Guy appreciates it.
-TVG
Hey Mark –
Good to hear! So..when was that Autotask/Quosal webinar scheduled for, I seem to have lost it on my calendar…
“)
Congratulations again on your acquisition!
Shameless plug…here’s the Quosal 10-minute tour link…
http://www.quosal.com/Wordpress/?p=450
Kent
Besides Order Porter (which my customers love) and beautifully formatted Proposals, another reason we’ve had such a good experience with Quosal is their support. We’ve been with Quosal over a year and from the first day they started our installation and training, we’ve had excellent service from them. In fact, it’s very common to see one of my enhancement requests in an automatic update less than a month after I request it. Quosal management is very forward thinking and it shows in their modern software and integration with things like Azure. I think it also helps that Quosal uses their own software in their company, so whenever they get a new feature request, it’s easy for them to see how valuable it can be for everyone.
Anyway, in the past we’ve used both Quotewerks and ChannelOnline, but nothing can touch Quosal for ease of use, ease of integration, flexibility and rich feature set.
Many of the other posts have covered it well; ease of use, Order Porter, great support and a forward thinking development team. We went from years of using ChannelOnline where we just had no flexibility in the look of our quotes to Quotewerks. We absolutely hated Quotewerks! It had a user interface that very frequently showed it was designed by programmers and not for end-users. Sure, we probably could get it to do most of what we wanted, but the hoops we had to jump through were crazy. So, we gave Quosal a shot. Within a day we were certain we made the right choice and within a week there was no way we would ever switch back to Quotewerks. Awesome product with awesome support!
I would caution any QuoteWerks users considering moving to Quosal. We were going to move to it but decided not to. We ran into bugs, slow app performance and support that was not on par with QuoteWerks. I am glad to see QuoteWerks is coming out with something similar to Order Porter (according to Jim’s post). That was the primary reason we wanted Quosal, but I would much rather have that feature on QuoteWerks and stay with the same tool (we have 8+ years of quote history in QuoteWerks).
That’s unfortunate Jill. We have never had performace issues or serious bugs in Quosal. And I’m especially surprised to hear you had trouble getting support. My experience has been the exact opposite from yours.
Jill, our experience has been the same as Sam’s. Performance and support have both been great. As far as functionality in Quotewerks, we constantly ran into areas where the program just didn’t perform. We have four separate and distinct business units and operate in a tri-state area with many tax implications. Quosal was functionally a better fit for us, not to mention more user friendly. In our case we did not have 8+ years with Quotewerks. We had about 6 months. I can tell you that getting up-to-speed on Quosal was a LOT easier than it was with Quotewerks. I suppose if we had 8+ years of knowledge, switching from what I was familiar with might be more of a hurdle, but I am surprised you had performance and issues. That has not been the case for us.
I second Ed here. With 8+ years in a product its hard to imagine anything else, however i dont think that fits everyones perspective. Quosal is a superior product from everypoint but especially if you are starting. Just go through the features with Quosal. The quotes look amazingly more polished, the integration pieces are included, it can be run on Azure (huge benefit), they work on the quote templates with you, the order porter is obviously beneficial, you can integrate payment systems. The list goes on.
Quosal really can take this process to the next level, and most importantly i think, they make it fun (yes fun) to work in. Honestly the laborious part of quoting is automated in Quosal.
I’m John Lewe President of Aspire Technologies, the developer of QuoteWerks.
I was reading through these comments and wanted to take the opportunity to clarify and comment myself.
ConnectWise had the vision 5 years ago to write an integration to QuoteWerks which was largely adopted throughout the ConnectWise community. We assumed all these years that since ConnectWise wrote the integration to QuoteWerks for their customers that it was meeting their needs.
Sidebar: ConnectWise wrote the integration to QuoteWerks and charged about $695 for it. ConnectWise did not write an integration to Quosal. Quosal wrote an integration to ConnectWise and included it in their product’s base price.
Turns out the existing link was not meeting their needs and Quosal stepped in and offered a more complete integration than the integration that ConnectWise wrote to QuoteWerks.
At the 2009 ConnectWise Partner summit, it became clear after speaking with ConnectWise customers that stopped by our booth that we needed to write our own built-in integration to ConnectWise.
We did just that. Even while our new ConnectWise integration was in beta, we had so many orders for this new integration that our February 2010 sales were higher than they have ever been in 17 years. Then it happened again in March 2010. I only state the sales numbers as an indication of the level of endorsement of our new ConnectWise integration. A video of the new integration can be viewed at http://www.quotewerks.com/connectwisecommunity.asp
Since that Nov 2009 ConnectWise Partner Summit we have been making many changes in response to the needs of the IT community. Frankly, it is really rewarding to add all these great features and to have our customers give us such great feedback and endorsement through their purchasing of the updates.
Having over 57,000 users in 101 countries, QuoteWerks is used by many industries. As a software developer it is always challenging to determine which features to release and in what order, etc. It is a really exciting time now for us here at Aspire because we are now getting back to our roots and redirecting our focus back to the IT industry.
Another example of our re-dedication to the IT Industry is our new Etilize product content integration used primarily by the IT industry.
I would like to offer a couple more points of clarification.
1) One of the comments above by Kent at Quosal said that Quosal “has been a work in process for about 20 years…”. QuoteWerks has been sold since 1993. Quosal has been sold since 2008.
2) There is a comment about some VARS jumping from QuoteWerks to Quosal. We have spoken with some of these VARS that have purchased Quosal and are now switching back to QuoteWerks.
3) QuoteWerks has always focused on keeping costs down. Of all the quoting tools mentioned in these comments, we are the least expensive quoting tool. There is a comment about Quosal’s integration with Ingram Micro, Tech Data, etc which is at no extra cost. Quosal includes real-time in their base price of $650. QuoteWerks costs $349 (base price) + $199 (realtime – extra cost), totaling $548. This is $102 less expensive (with the extra cost). This is a great example of the old saying that “you can’t believe everything you hear”.
4) There were several comments about QuoteWerks proposal writing abilities. Much of this, regrettably, was just a lack of marketing and product awareness campaigns on our behalf. You can see yourself how QuoteWerks proposals are created in this video http://www.youtube.com/quotewerks#p/u/3/TpmVaqU3Ui8
5) As Jim and Jill had mentioned in their comments, we do in fact have an online quote delivery system in the works. It’s called QuoteValet.
John: The VAR Guy thanks you for jumping into the conversation. Our resident blogger realizes that users and rivals sometimes voice strong opinions. But it’s always good to get additional insight from folks like you.
-TVG
Even after your explanation I
Even after your explanation I guess I don’t understand why we switched. Was it vitally important? It seems as though there have been more problems since.
Ruth James | http://www.profitfab.com