IT Nation 2014: ConnectWise Integrates, Updates, Simplifies

ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini announced several updates to the professional automation services platform during his keynote address at IT Nation in Orlando today.  Among the many updates are integrations that simplify and speed cloud migrations, improvements to the user interface, email tagging for service tickets, integration with customers’ Active Directory to let technicians identify users, and more.

“What we are looking at today is massive technological change,” Bellini told a packed conference room. “Every industry is being changed dramatically… Computers can hear and watch and measure and locate anything we want them to.

“…the real operating system of the world is the internet.”

Bellini provided a few examples of how companies and innovations are changing how we live. Tesla is a car company that started with a computer and built a car around it.

“Tesla will change the transportation industry the way we know it today,” Bellini said. It’s a disruptor, and there are a lot of other companies that aren’t happy about that.

Another change – electronic toll roads that let cars speed through by collecting payments electronically.

Uber is another example, changing how people hire car services.

“It’s not something that’s so sophisticated. It’s not just about these large companies,” Bellini said.

Here’s a look at the enhancements, updates and new features Bellini and hist staff announced during the keynote

The following are some of the UI improvements:

And among the next set of "reinventions" are the following:

“The real purpose of this was to revolutionize support,” Bellini said. “To connect a ticketing system with a communication system that could extend down to the desktop of every one of your end users. it gives you ability to be way more responsive to end users than the the internal employees than their own IT departments.”

BizDox and more

Also coming up to speed at this IT Nation is the BizDox story. ConnectWise invested in this company, looking to add documentation of IT systems as an option for its Modern Office suite (which includes LabTech Software and Quosal).

ConnectWise has also made changes to its project management module, enabling the ability to add a resource to multiple project tickets at one time.

Integrations in the ConnectWise’s Modern Office Suite (which include ConnectWise, LabTech Software, BizDox, Quosal, and more) have brought Quosal’s capabilities to mobile platforms. Quosal users can submit expense reports and time sheets, plus signatures on quotes directly from their mobile devices. Bellini said that support will be added shortly for Windows Phone, too.

“We are taking the technology we have in front of us and connecting it,” Bellini said.

Putting business intelligence to work

ConnectWise also showed big updates in business intelligence and reports. A demo showed a dashboard of sales by team member that could be drilled down into to reveal more information about issues with performance.

“We are changing the way you interact with reports. Let’s see where they are at, what kinds of opportunities are open. What about their revenue and margin over the past 12 months. You’ll be able to drill into all these things and get more metrics as well. “

Cloud Migration

Another demo showed the Cloud Manager, which lets your company create standards for IT performance and then shows customer assets that are out of compliance with those standards. From there, you can automatically create a Quosal proposal for, say, an Exchange 2007 migration. That proposal can be sent with a video chat message to the customer.

To fulfill the order, ConnectWise has created a migration tool that lets you choose from a list of IaaS providers including Amazon Web Services, Azure, Rackspace, Cloud Sigma or your own private cloud.  This wizard-driven migration tool lets you migrate services from legacy implementations to modern ones fast. The demo, from quote to migrated email box took about seven minutes.

Those interested in the beta for this feature can contact [email protected]

The marketing challenge

Finally, ConnectWise has added a marketing component to the platform that simplifies doing email campaigns, creating landing pages and web forms.

And another new feature is Sherlock, a natural language search that generates reports.

There’s more in terms of API integrations and platform updates, and I’ll be speaking with Jeannine Edwards later to get further details. Watch MSPmentor  for more updates from IT Nation.