ConnectWise launched Asio, the next-generation platform that will eventually power its entire portfolio, at last year’s IT Nation Connect. Already, company executives say, products based on the new system, including ConnectWise RMM, the brand new ConnectWise Vulnerability Management, and parts of ConnectWise PSA (formerly known as ConnectWise Manage), are enjoying better performance, reliability, and scalability as a result.
Yet those gains may only scratch the surface of what Asio ultimately means for ConnectWise and its partners once all of its functionality is in place and everything the company sells is running on it. For one thing, Magee notes, hosting the entire ConnectWise portfolio on a common foundation will make identifying security threats easier by enabling the company to correlate activities across applications in previously impossible ways.
“Having a cyber tech stack and a unified [RMM] tech stack sitting on top of the same platform is going to be tremendous for the MSPs and for their customers,” Magee says.
Having everything on Asio will benefit anyone who’s ever wished ConnectWise and vendors like it responded to feature requests faster too, he adds. “Our ability to move quicker, our ability to innovate and do stuff and create new solutions on top of that platform, is going to be great for the MSPs,” Magee says.
Indeed, Jake Varghese (pictured right), who as executive vice president and general manager of ConnectWise’s business management unit is responsible for both ConnectWise RMM and ConnectWise PSA, has already experienced some of that roadmap acceleration. “The speed at which I can make change is just exponentially better,” he says, thanks to Asio’s library of ready-made services. Imagine, for example, someone asks for a new feature in ConnectWise RMM.
“I don’t have to worry about the user management piece, authentication, authorization,” Varghese observes. “That’s all built as part of the platform. All I need to focus on is taking care of the specific scenario that you mentioned, which means I can release updates, enhancements, and innovations much quicker than I’ve been able to do before.”
But what may prove to be Asio’s biggest impact will come gradually over time, as the deep pool of partner and end user data the platform gathers enables its AI-powered business intelligence engine to provide advance notice of technical issues via predictive analytics, thereby letting MSPs who spend their days fighting fires prevent them from happening instead.
“We’re investing heavily in that,” says Varghese, adding that ConnectWise PSA users will get a first glimpse of the return on that investment via a new, unspecified feature coming soon.
“I was hoping to announce that at IT Nation, but I think it’ll be towards the end of this year,” he says.
