The market for PSA software is filled with well-known products from name-brand vendors. That hasn’t kept two of the newest competitors in that space, Harmony Business Systems and ServiceTree, from biding their time about joining the fray.
“We’re trying to be very careful and methodical about our approach, and slowly and steadily ramp up the presence,” says Felix Ekman, U.K.-based Harmony’s head of marketing and channel sales, in comments that apply to Australia-based ServiceTree as well.
Both companies spoke with ChannelPro at the 2019 ChannelCon event, which was hosted by industry association CompTIA last week in Las Vegas.
Harmony PSA, Harmony’s one and only offering, has been available for about two years. Ekman won’t disclose how many partners the company has at present except to say that they span the globe, that a majority of them are in North America, and that they’re not huge in number.
“We’re aware that we’re a single-digit market share right now. We are aiming to be double digits in the next couple of years,’ Ekman says. “We’re looking to expand a lot.”
But only once its onboarding and support processes have the scalability required to maintain close contact with many MSPs at once. That kind of hands-on approach to partner relationships has been a hallmark of Harmony’s competitive strategy since the beginning.
“We want to keep a certain level of engagement,” Ekman says. “That’s been vitally important for us.”
When the time to go big arrives, Harmony will rely on the financial reporting data it provides to set itself apart from better-known products from companies like ConnectWise, Datto’s Autotask unit, Kaseya, and SolarWinds MSP. According to Ekman, those other systems are rooted in ticket or project management. Harmony, by contrast, has contract management at its core, and can provide deeper data on revenue, costs, and profitability as a result.
“You have real, real insight into your business,” Ekman says, adding that the solution lets users act on that information as well. “You can basically trigger any action you want from the system.”
Harmony PSA integrates with RMM tools from SolarWinds MSP, NinjaRMM, and Continuum at present. “We have a couple more in the pipeline that we’re thinking about,” Ekman says. The solution exchanges data with a wide array of other products as well, including BDR software from MSP360 (formerly CloudBerry), Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft SharePoint, Slack, QuickBooks, and HubSpot. According to Ekman, Harmony has no ambition in the short or long term to compete with any of those companies.
“We’re pure play PSA, and we don’t want to go into the other spaces,” he says, describing a future in which Harmony PSA is a “connector” tying together all of the systems an MSP uses. “The best way we can do that is to open up to everyone, have our open APIs, and do our integrations, because as the market shifts we can shift with it.”
That strategy runs counter to the prevailing trend in managed services software—driven by ConnectWise, Kaseya, SolarWinds MSP, and others—towards expansive application suites. Harmony is well aware of that fact.
