“It’s nice to see them focusing on what MSPs need. In recent years, they have focused on big trends. This is back to basics in a good way,” says Dustin Bolander, founder, partner and CIO of Clear Guidance Partners.

ConnectWise Chief Product Officer Jeff Bishop said the company’s new Asio platform is poised to provide visibility into its entire suite of managed products through a single pane of glass.

“Our priority is to deliver innovation, product stability, ease of use and an open ecosystem, all of which are critical to our partnership with you and your continued success, and we know we can’t just rely on one vision,” said Bishop to the audience during a presentation at the company’s annual IT Nation 2024 show.

Dustin Bolander, founder, partner and CIO of Austin, Texas-based Clear Guidance Partners, a longtime ConnectWise partner, said from what he’s seen so far, the Asio platform is a return to form for the company.

“It’s nice to see them focusing on what MSPs need,” Bolander said. “In the last few years, they have focused on big trends. This is back to basics in a good way.”

(RELATED: ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo Says Asio Is ‘Ready For Primetime’)

Asio is ConnectWise’s vision for a unified platform where MSPs can run all their products and manage their customers’ digital heritage from one place. The technologically ambitious project debuted at IT Nation 2021 and has been in development ever since.

ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo previously told CRN that crossing the finish line is a top priority for him and ConnectWise’s private equity owner Thoma Bravo.

Rivelo said Asio has received about $70 million in investment and ConnectWise is prepared to spend whatever it takes to make this a success.

“We just put PSA on the platform and we’ve been getting early access to that for a while,” Rivelo told the crowd of MSPs at IT Nation on Wednesday, adding that of the 3,000 MSPs using the platform, 1,000 are using the new built-in PSA. , which he said is still in early access as he tests it.

During his presentation, Bishop said the team that designed Asio preserved the ease of use of the platform by MSPs.

“Asio is our purpose-built, enterprise-grade platform for the MSP community that centralizes your products, your data, provides a common user experience, and removes much of the manual work you have to do today for your employees, customers and integrating disparate solutions,” Bishop said.

What’s new with Asio?

Bishop said that inside Asio, the product has a PSA, an RMM, ConnectWise Security 360 vulnerability management, data protection, robotic process automation, dozens and hundreds of integrations and more than 150 shared services that all these products take advantage of.

Bishop said there are thousands of users worldwide and that RMM is used in 2.2 million endpoints. He also said that Asio is adopting an API mindset with development to keep the ecosystem open and scalable for partners.

But it’s more than just the products inside, Bishop said, because Asio improves the entire MSP user experience.

“In the last four or five months, we’ve made a lot of different improvements. We created custom actions, webhooks for triggers, the ability to add variables, delays. We can incorporate bots as part of workflows,” he told the audience.
“Look, this is a huge change from what it was last year, and I hope you get a chance to go out there and test it out.”

Why this is important for MSPs

In the solution provider industry, much of the code that makes up the operational software that MSPs use to run their businesses is outdated. In many cases, it was updated as needed, combined with other products through acquisitions, and exploited and patched repeatedly.

What ConnectWise is trying to do with Asio is bring all of its tools together into a platform built with modern code that delivers a superior experience for MSPs—all the tools to run their business in one unified place—while removing obstacles involved in their older software.

“Asio is more than just packaging that launches various product lines,” said Bishop. “It’s a real consolidated platform. It delivers the experience where products and services are designed to use the same fundamentals to enable our partners to scale and grow faster than they ever thought possible.”

What does it mean for frontline engineers?

Bishop said Asio materially simplifies the onboarding and training of new employees.

“You no longer have to map companies, sites and devices between all the different products in our portfolio,” he said.

Bishop said Asio eliminates the need to match a user’s security access rights for several different products.

“For many of the MSPs I speak to, this is extremely difficult to do,” he said. “These products, with our new centralized service, make that simple, so it’s just one place you go to do it all.”

Bishop said Asio also acts as a hub for hyper-automation, which he said is like a combination of AI and automation that ConnectWise is working to implement across its product suite to enable engineers to talk to the products.

“It’s a state-of-the-art AI solution that has been integrated with nearly every product in our portfolio, and it continues to evolve and grow as we enable it inside Asio,” Bishop said.

Bots and digital agents

Bishop described how users can create and incorporate robotic process automation and bots into their workflows by building one during a live demo.

“All you have to do is go in and name them, describe it, and then go in and add your own script to the system, and then you can save that bot, which can be used inside Sidekick, inside a chatbot , in PSA or inside our workflow engine, whatever works for you and your business processes,” he said.

In looking for ways to improve MSP profitability, Bishop said ConnectWise has focused on finding ways to automate employee and prospect onboarding and onboarding, as MSPs manage this not just for themselves but for their customers.

“We’ve started building our own production-ready automations that will give MSPs a template you can use for onboarding, opt-out, and more that we’re rolling out the rest of this year. . One of the big areas that we’re making sure we’ve focused on is that on-board and off-board experience because we know that takes up so much time for your different teams.”

Build it and share it

Bishop said in Asio, ConnectWise has its own drag-and-drop workflow design engine that has been simplified for users and now has enhanced features, including the ability to create webhooks for triggers, adding time delays and the ability to add variables. .

Bishop said one of the priorities within IT Nation is sharing best practices, so the Asio platform will allow MSPs to share their best creations with their team or all ConnectWise users.

“Beyond all of that, we’re also in the process of making sure you can start sharing what you’re building with the community, whether it’s digital workers, workflows or bots,” he said. “Our community concept now allows you to create and share them with other MSPs in your family or with the entire IT Nation community.”