LabTech Software Gains Managed Services Momentum
LabTech Software, a remote monitoring and management (RMM) software provider, has gained some managed services momentum. The company, which attracted investment money from ConnectWise Capital in February 2010, now has more than 300 customers. Here’s an update from LabTech CEO Matt Nachtrab, and some perspectives for MSPs.
LabTech is quick to note that sales have grown “over 1000 percent” since the ConnectWise Capital investment. But it’s important to put those figures in perspective. Generally speaking, LabTech has a smaller installed base than most of the entrenched RMM software providers.
Still, LabTech is showing momentum. Nachtrab says LabTech now has over 300 customers, with 30 to 50 new customers coming online per month. March and April, Nachtrab adds, were the strongest months in LabTech’s history.
Staffing Up
To accelerate that growth and maintain service quality, LabTech has made hires across sales, marketing and support — though Nachtrab declines to discuss exact headcount figures. Nachtrab now maintains an apartment in the Tampa, Fla., area to work more closely with ConnectWise Capital. But LabTech’s development team and some administrative staff remain in Toledo, Ohio — the region where LabTech launched.
LabTech says some of its recent momentum involves switching MSPs from the Kaseya platform to the LabTech platform. But LabTech says its customer base also includes first-time MSPs.
That’s an increasingly familiar theme in the managed services market, where upstarts like CentraStage of the UK are targeting Kaseya service providers as potential converts. For its part, Kaseya says the new Kaseya 2 platform is off to a record start.
Next Moves
Looking ahead, LabTech is developing a hosted version of its software. Near term, T2 Solutions of Scotland is expected to introduce a hosted LabTech offering for Europe. (I suspect details will surface in a few weeks.) And LabTech itself plans to deliver a hosted version late this year.
Meanwhile, ConnectWise has vowed to make sure its PSA (professional services automation) platform remains open to all RMM platforms.
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We’ve got an independent community with quite a few labtech users up at http://lipstickonapig.ning.com
some best practices, and lots of people who have questions answered.
We have just signed up to use labtech over the last few weeks. I have to say it is very impressive.
Definitely worth a look.
We’re a Kaseya customer that recently looked at LabTech but felt it still lacked some of the key features and architecture we relay on Kaseya for. Labtech’s price is what caught our attention and made it attractive but in the end we couldn’t give up the features we need.
Ryon: I must concede… I haven’t been able to get an accurate read on Kaseya pricing vs. the competition. But on the other hand, I’m just a blogger who often doesn’t understand licensing terms 😉
Ryon: If you are referring to Antivirus integration, we have an Antivirus solution for you as of yesterday. We have not done any press releases or other announcements. They will be coming very soon. Your LabTech Sales Manager will be in contact with you, but feel free to reach out if you would like more information.
Thanks, Matt
Hi All,
I wanted to just introduce our site to you which is http://www.MSPcomparison.com it’s a rate an review site where MSPs can share their experiences and rate the solutions which Managed Services Providers use every day, currently we have RMM, and PSA (going up as we speak or read:)) and the plan forward is to have AV, Online Backup, HaaS, and anything else relevant.
Of course for market news/updates MSPmentor is the #1 resource.
We are a Kaseya CONVERT. I see Ryon felt that Labtech lacked some features that Kaseya had, hmmmmm. Now that I have fully converted and have been running the newest version for the last 2 months or so, I can not agree with this statement. While Labtech does lack a remote backup solution that Kaseya has, I can not think of one other feature that is lacking when compared to Kaseya but I can certainly state many many things that work better or are far more advanced than Kaseya. Once thing is for sure, the price point that Labtech has and the level of service that they put forth both at the support and management level is 1000 times better than Kaseya. Those two things alone were enough to get me to switch after investing $90k in Kaseya.
Some of the things that really impress me about Labtech are as follows in no particular order:
1. SPEED of the SYSTEM – K2 CRAWLED
2. Automation built into the product
3. Provided script set and tools – Kaseya scripts were very basic and had no real value and all of the tools required had to be obtained and added to the server
4. The overall monitoring approach is far superior to basic event monitoring like Kaseya does – I no longer have to triage 1200 tickets to find 25 that mean something useful
5. The granularity of both rights and groupoing of activities – Yes K2 introduced this but at what cost, SPEED
6. Finally, Labtech uses a truly field tech approach to MSP services and most tasks can be done behind the seens without interfering with your customers abilty to do work.
I only wish I had found this solution sooner and I would have saved a ton of cash and had a more refined solution for my business.
Interesting comments. We are currently using Kaseya, and have not been able to make the move to K2 because of many reasons. I would like to understand what features Labtech lacked that Ryon indicated. So far we dont really see any based on our Labtech demo environment we have running at the moment.
Kevin, how did your migration from Kaseya to Labtech go? Did you invest quite heavily into Kaseya before moving to Labtech? How long did it take to migrate?
Does anyone here use either Labtech or Kaseya to manage POS systems and self service kiosks? We’re looking for a platform that is tailored to handle deployments of those unattended POS system. TIA.
Philly, I know Kaseya has POS customers in the 5,000-30,000 seat range. Real numbers, no padding.
PCI compliance can be important in this arena and there are some nice capabilities deeply integrated into the product to help with this (think granular logging, robust two factor authentication, secure policy-based remote access controls, etc).
I’ve worked with POS vendors that use embedded Windows OS distributions that are very limited in their core OS component/service support where full distributions of .NET may not be available. No .NET requirements with Kaseya. Native (not emulated) Linux agents too if your POS OS of choice is a minimal Linux OS.
Take what you hear from everyone else who has a lot to say about Kaseya that isn’t Kaseya with a grain of salt. While you’re at it, you may want to grab the entire shaker – you’ll get an earful from people with an agenda or an axe to grind.
Full disclosure – if I didn’t make it obvious yet, I work for Kaseya 🙂
Philly Tech@9: You raise an interesting question about POS and kiosk management. We’ll keep that requirement in mind as MSPmentor plans future coverage.
Benjamin@10: Thanks for disclosing employment with Kaseya. Vendor comments are always welcome on MSPmentor but we always push for such disclosures so readers can reach more informed conclusions.
-jp