Vendor to Watch: TruGrid

IT WAS 2015 when Peter Ayedun, a 20-year MSP, came to the conclusion that prompted him to launch Schaumburg, Ill.-based TruGrid: “It’s always been obvious to me that software for our industry leaves a lot to be desired.”

Managed service providers typically invest in RMM and PSA solutions, and then purchase third-party tools for anti-virus, encryption, remote access, and more. This increases the MSP’s costs, creates integration and vendor management issues, and adds onboarding complexity, Ayedun says.

“There’s got to be a better way,” the TruGrid CEO recalls concluding. “There needs to be software that has a centralized console that can actually take advantage of what’s already built into Windows without you having to buy a third-party tool.”

MSPs have not taken advantage of these built-in capabilities historically because Microsoft hasn’t made it easy to adopt them within one business, much less across multiple tenants, Ayedun says.

Built for the needs of MSPs managing multiple customers, the TruGrid software platform is a consolidated management interface based on Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS). Ayedun says three charters drove the system’s design: simplicity, security, and profitability for MSPs.

Since the June launch of its remote access product, which can scale to support millions of users, TruGrid has sold nearly 10,000 licenses. It includes a multitenant dashboard, integrated two-step verification/multifactor authentication with single sign-on, integrated identity management risk monitoring, and a multilocation disaster recovery system.

The platform is sold through both channel partners and directly. In June, TruGrid inked a one-year agreement with The ASCII Group offering members discounted prices.

The company aims to roll out IoT agent encryption, Windows Defender management, and remote control solutions before the end of the year, and has a policy management tool in the works too.

“[We] didn’t reinvent the wheel,” says Ayedun of TruGrid’s RDS-based product strategy. Rather, TruGrid leveraged the wheel to reduce MSP pain points.