Manny Rivelo, at just Week 3 on the job as the new CEO of ConnectWise, sat down with MSP Success to talk about his charter to lead the company forward, the opportunity ahead for MSPs, and how ConnectWise plans to respond to competitors like Kaseya on the pricing front. This is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.
MSP Success: What are some factors that appealed to you about coming to lead ConnectWise?
Manny Rivelo: You look at the company, the culture, the growth, the success—it’s been phenomenal. But there are two things that stood out for me. One is The IT Nation Community. The focus on what we’re trying to do with the MSP community to serve the SMBs is unique. I’ve worked for companies that built communities in the past, and if you do right by the community, you will be successful. So that was a huge draw. I admire what we’ve done there and what we can potentially continue to do there.
Second was the focus of looking for a holistic solution for the MSPs to address the SMB market through this concept of the Asio platform, which is a unique product and the industry’s first, where we’re trying to bring the various different services that an MSP needs to be successful but wrapping that all around a common UX/UI. That allows them to run their business and creates value for the SMB and then … increasing the productivity and [driving the] cost of ownership down through things like AI and automation. That was very, very appealing.
MSP Success: Did Thoma Bravo, the private equity firm that owns ConnectWise, seek you out?
Rivelo: We’d sold half of Forcepoint, and I brought in my successor and was going to take six months off. But I took a call from Thoma Bravo. There were a lot of great things that were presented to me by lots of different outfits, but I go back to what is unique about this opportunity. And then the economics of the business model. We’re here to serve the SMB community through the MSPs. The multiplier effect we get to serve that SMB community through the MSPs is massive. The SMB’s business is getting more complex. They need more services to run their business and … and they can’t absorb those services on their own. Sometimes opportunity knocks at the right time. I consider it to be the right time, maybe a little bit faster than I wanted, but I got a little vacation in there.
MSP Success: So obviously you know that there had been talk last year that Thoma Bravo was looking to sell ConnectWise. Are you charged with leading through the next stage of growth or getting it ready for sale?
Rivelo: I’m leaning to the next stage of growth. Our ownership, Thoma Bravo, just agreed to two good acquisitions in the data protection space because they continue to see value creation and growth for the business. If they were wanting to sell it, there’s no reason to acquire. It takes a while to get returns from an acquisition.
So no, I’m chartered with growing the business to the next stage of growth. Obviously, if an outcome comes along the way, that would be a decision that the shareholders will have to make. But that is not the intent. I’m here to continue to drive that value and potentially maybe even additional acquisitions if they make sense for us and for our partner community. As a business we are committed to the MSPs, period. So every single employee—there’s 3,000 plus of us in this company—are committed to making the MSP successful. We know that someday maybe it will transact. We don’t know when that’s going to be, it doesn’t matter. We plan on being here to service the MSPs … We’re driving as fast as we can to add value.
MSP Success: In the MSP platform space, both Kaseya and NinjaOne rolled out some aggressively priced bundles this year. Will ConnectWise respond to the pricing issue?
Rivelo: Yeah, we will always reply to the market dynamics, but we’re also looking at total cost of ownership. You look at MSPs and a big part of their cost is their organizational structure, their FTEs [full-time employees]. So we also plan on tackling that issue, which means can we make those FTEs more productive, and with our Asio platform, we believe that is the case. We have various proof points where we can shave the amount of time that an MSP consumes to do a task for an end customer, and therefore we can get more productivity out of an MSP, get more productivity out of their FTEs. The price of the product is a small part of the total cost of ownership of what an MSP has to run their business. And that’s where the platform and things like automation and AI become very valuable to be able to solve some of those issues. But yes, we will definitely respond. You will get some [information] at IT Nation, and we will always respond to the market dynamics. We are not going to be priced out or create a disadvantage to ourselves because we didn’t respond.
MSP Success: So you will be announcing something that’s competitive to Kaseya 365?
Rivelo: We have a lot of announcements coming. Packaging, pricing kind of solutions, you’ll see stuff from us for sure.
MSP Success: Can you talk about ConnectWise’s strategy and how the product road map may differ from your competitors?
Rivelo: So we’re looking at the migration of a platform. Some of those competitors have one or two pillars. We have four pillars. The business management stack, the unified management stack, a security stack, and now most recently from acquisition we have a business continuity and resiliency stack. All of that is being integrated into one common platform. And that platform also enables third-party integrations. So we’re looking at a broader solution set that is multitenant, cloud-delivered with hyper automation and AI built into it to reduce the total cost of ownership. So that’s how we differ. We’re not looking at licensing or packaging. We’re looking at a pureplay, purpose-built platform from the ground up. Not just can we bundle these two products together and offer them in a SKU?
And then we have to be clear about providing an onramp for our current customers if they want to move to a platform. Some partners may not want to move to a platform, and that’s OK. Those point products are very good, but we are going to offer an upgrade path for all of them to come to Asio as they see fit.
There’s no plans to end of life our legacy products. They’re still great products. Many, many partners love them, and they’ve integrated them into their own processes. If we get down to the point that the majority are onboarded [to Asio] we’ll address that, but we’ll give plenty of notice. And we also support the products even after we end of life them, so we will not strand customers by any means. Those products are not dead products, they are viable, growing products, but we think that there is a better answer longer term for those that want to consume the broader breadth through the platform.
MSP Success: And ConnectWise is still committed to an open ecosystem with Asio?
Rivelo: Yes, it’ll have an open set of APIs. We’ll make it very simple. We’re not looking to build a platform to lock people out. We’re building a platform to make it easier for the MSP to run their business.
MSP Success: Can you give me a bit of insight into what you’ll be telling MSP partners at IT Nation?
Rivelo: I will tell them who I am and why I’m here. I want to demystify any concerns of “we have an enterprise guy in the MSP business.” I don’t consider myself to be an enterprise guy. I consider myself to be an innovator in the market. And then I will share with them why the MSP community is going to thrive going forward and why it’s a great place to be. The key will be, how do we grow together? Our growth is tied to the MSP’s growth, so we need to make MSPs more successful. So my keynote will be about the opportunity that we have.