GMS Live Expert has integrated its outsourced help desk service with Kaseya Ltd.‘s managed services software.
Under an arrangement formally unveiled at last week’s Kaseya Connect partner conference in Las Vegas, users of the Virtual System Administrator (VSA) remote monitoring and management solution that also purchase NOC services from Kaseya can automatically route end user support tickets directly to Kaseya’s Business Management System (BMS) PSA platform and from there to GMS Live Expert technicians, rather than execute that workflow manually.
The integration, which is available immediately, also works with PSA systems from Autotask Corp., of East Greenbush, N.Y., and ConnectWise, of Tampa, Fla., among others.
“We’ve taken the MSP out of the middle,” says Wayne Goldstein, CEO of Global Mentoring Solutions, GMS Live Expert’s Unionville, Ont.-based parent company. “We can actually bypass the MSP and just take care of stuff for them.”
Channel pros who wish to take advantage of that opportunity must perform a one-time manual setup process on their PSA system and have or open an account with GMS. As part of its alliance with Kaseya, GMS is offering help desk services to VSA users at discounted rates.
Kaseya, which has dual headquarters in Miami and New York City, is currently the only managed services software maker offering GMS customers an automated help desk ticketing workflow. According to Goldstein, GMS has no plans at present to seek such deals with other RMM and PSA vendors.
Though seamless to MSPs who utilize it, the link between Kaseya’s offerings and GMS’s took some 2 and a half months to design and implement. The 2 vendors forged that connection in response to requests from joint customers who asked the companies to make shepherding end user support queries to GMS operators simpler.
GMS has operated a NOC of its own since January. Goldstein doesn’t consider Kaseya a competitor, however, because his service caters to a subset of the MSP market willing to pay premium rates for NOC assistance based exclusively in North America.
“We’re basically in 2 different markets,” he says.
Kaseya revealed that it had purchased Unigma LLC and introduced a cloud management solution at last week’s Kaseya Connect show, and also introduced a new version of BMS with multi-tenant functionality for franchise organizations and similar businesses in need of parent-child connections between headquarters PSA implementations and separately run deployments at MSP member practices. As ChannelPro was first to report, VSA now offers that same capability as well.
