Lessons Learned from Moving to My Second PSA
One of the biggest decisions an IT consultant can make are the choice of a ticketing system/PSA system and the choice of a remoting monitoring and patch management system (RMM). In fact, if you go to almost any forum on any social platform, if there are people talking about getting started in managed service, two of the hottest topics are “What do you use for PSA?” and “What do you use for RMM?” And that has been true for twenty years.
And while people can (somewhat) imagine changing RMM tools, there’s a deeply held belief that changing your PSA would be a nightmare. Well, I’ve gone through it more than once and here’s what I learned.
To set the stage, if you haven’t been reading this series, I signed up with ConnectWise in 2006. It required a dedicated server with SQL licenses. We bought a very beefy server that was pretty much guaranteed to be powerful enough to last four or five years. So, in year four, we started looking for alternatives.
Why? Well, for two simple reasons. First, it required all that hardware any by 2009 we had moved almost everything to some kind of cloud service, so we wanted a hosted PSA if it was were ready for primetime. The hardware costs were much too high. Second, while generally stable, the ConnectWise of the time needed a lot of maintenance from us and them. And when things went wrong, it was always an argument. That’s just my experience. Your mileage may vary.
Not completely unrelated, we also had a very beefy and expensive Kaseya RMM server. The machine was about the same age and server requirements were about the same. So we wanted to move that to another RMM. Again, hardware vs. hosting costs.
Bottom line: We committed to Autotask as long as they could get us moved on a fairly tight schedule. They argued that our timeline was too short, but my brother Manuel was the company president at the time and the two of us committed that there would be zero resistance on our side.
Autotask managed to download pretty much everything from the CW system. But we had to put up with the fact that most of it would not upload to the “same” location in AT. Much of the data showed up in very large blobs, which were easily searchable. It was a minor pain, as far as I was concerned.
The only functionality we “lost” here was the ability to quickly look up historical/archival information. And that’s just not something we ever did on a regular basis. I put quotes on lost because we could still find what we needed, but that required a new, clunky process rather than just executing a familiar function.
We had five technicians at the time so we were able to easily re-create the open tickets in the new system in short order. On January 1st we flipped the switch and we were live on Autotask.
Of course, the hardest part of any such move is learning to do the “same” thing a new way in a new system. This is true with Word vs. Google Docs as well as Xero vs. QuickBooks or any other competing products.
A few year later, I sold my managed service business but continued to work with the new owner, doing sales and managing some migration projects. He moved us to Max Focus, now Solar Winds MSP. That move was much smoother as we had access to an independent contractor whose tools we used, and he was able to download data from the SQL database and do some formatting for us.
Smoother, but again no official data exporting/importing functions.
From each of these experiences, two lessons became crystal clear. Most importantly, the moves were made easier because we configured each PSA system to fit OUR processes and procedures. We started with our processes and then configured the PSA around them. If we completely revamped our processes each time to fit the new PSA, it would have been far more disruptive to our company.
I will note that when I started another MSP business, I adopted Max Focus and found that it had evolved to be configured very nicely out of the box. If someone had little or no experience running an IT consulting business, they could get going with very little delay. Of course I still recommend molding the system to fit your processes. But it was a good experience from the start.
They second big lesson here is one of my pet peeves: Zero data portability. I have been arguing for three years that you own your data and you should be demanding that vendors make it possible to take your data and go somewhere else if you choose to. See https://blog.smallbizthoughts.com/2023/05/private-equity-doesnt-have-to-ruin-our.html
I still believe this is the future of all systems and will one day be forced upon the PSA vendors. So far, of course, it has gotten no traction. MSPs apparently don’t care – unless they’re trying to move their data. And vendors certainly don’t want to make it easier to switch away from them. I believe the only way this gets attention is that every company buying into a PSA system ask the simple question: How portable is my data? Today the answer is essentially “not.”
Feedback always welcome.
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This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page.
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Karl W. Palachuk is an executive coach and author of several books, including Managed Services in a Month and Relax Focus Succeed. He has built, bought, and sold several businesses, including two successful managed service businesses in Sacramento, CA. He advocates a holistic view of business, viewing the company as a system. You can find him at karlpalachuk.com or on LinkedIn. No artificial intelligence apps were used in the writing of this post.
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