Addressing MSP partners for the first time since ConnectWise announced its acquisition of Axcient last month, Axcient CEO Rod Mathews offered reassurance that both product innovation and partner relationships would continue apace.
On The Acquisition By ConnectWise
“A lot of questions have come in as to why we decided to do this,” said Mathews at the fifth annual MSP Xperience Summit yesterday, an online event. “So, I wanted to share that we ran an extensive and competitive sales process. There were really two paths that we considered—one was to join forces with an existing platform company and the other was to go build a platform by essentially doing more M&A. We joined forces with ConnectWise because it’s one of the largest MSP platforms in the industry.” Mathews went on to credit ConnectWise’s large member community and platform capabilities that Axcient will now have access to as well. Specifically, he cited capabilities like managed backup and reporting capabilities and integrations with other, larger platforms.
Reassurances To Axcient’s Partners
“Our focus within ConnectWise is maintaining what makes Axcient unique—continuing to deliver the things that we’ve done as a company, while we rapidly scale the business as part of this larger platform at ConnectWise,” Mathews said. He and Kevin Hoffman, CTO and co-founder of Axcient, recently put out an open letter, in alignment with ConnectWise, reaffirming their commitment to their partners in light of the recent acquisition. In both the letter and Mathew’s keynote, Axcient reassured their partners that predictable, usage-based billing and month-to-month contract flexibility will continue. Mathews also stated that Axcient intends to integrate with other environments besides ConnectWise in the future and will continue to invest in their support team.
Above all, Mathews stressed that if any partners are dissatisfied with Axcient’s upcoming changes, they should let the vendor know. He said: “If we are on a path that’s not working, we want to fail fast and make sure that we correct things. If there’s something that’s not working for you as a partner, we want to make sure we learn from that mistake and we correct it as quickly as possible. These are the commitments that we are making to our partners.”
Axcient’s Upcoming Roadmap
Hoffman then spoke on Axcient’s roadmap for the upcoming year. He stated that they will be focusing on cloud protection and recovery, painless data recovery and backup for MSPs, and an open ecosystem. “We know that there’s an ecosystem of vendors, and that each MSP has their own needs and is going to use the tools best suited for their business. We also know that BCDR data protection is your last line of defense and is a vital layer, that as an MSP, you need to know is working,” he says.
“We want to make it easy to do that regardless of which tech stack that you’re using. Now that we’re part of the ConnectWise family, we’ll be able to go the deepest and be the most integrated [with them]. But we’re also launching public APIs and investing a lot of energy to have deep integrations with other vendors. We have five official integrations that’ll be launching soon on our public APIs with large and well-known other MSP vendors, and another five in the pipeline,” Hoffman says.
These five direct integrations are with Cork, ScalePad, BrightGauge, Liongard, and Gradient MSP. The integration is fully live, and the backup radar integration with ScalePad was launched in beta earlier this week. The other integrations will be going live sometime in Q4.
