If ConnectWise MSP partners were expecting to hear a new pricing strategy from the stage at IT Nation Connect last week, in response to Kaseya’s moves, the most recent announced at DattoCon, they’ll have to wait until the first quarter of 2025, say company executives.
“We will be announcing Q1 strategies around pricing,” said new CEO Manny Rivelo (pictured above with outgoing CEO Jason Magee), in a press conference on Friday. “What we wanted to do at IT Nation is basically make sure there’s a clear understanding of where we are with the [Asio] platform and the vision of the platform, which is much greater than a bundling of technology.”
Rivelo stressed that reducing the cost of goods sold (COGS) only addresses 25% of an MSP’s costs, and that ConnectWise’s strategy with the Asio platform is to also reduce the cost of labor by improving efficiency through a common back end of services and data and a unified user interface and experience, with underlying AI and automation.
MSP Partners’ Expectations For ConnectWise Pricing
ConnectWise MSP partners are fully expecting a response to Kaseya’s pricing bundles. “I would expect to see ConnectWise launch a similar pricing model that like that within six months. They have to,” says Mark Calzone, vice president of operations at Sourcepass, a national MSP headquartered in Melville, New York. “It makes it easier for us,” says Calzone, noting that Sourcepass is a 15-year ConnectWise partner. “I think the more you simplify things like that, two things; you’re going to have loyalty from your customer base, and then you’re going to sell more because you’ve made it easier to acquire their product at that point too.”
Lawrence Cruciana, president of Corporate Information Technologies, an MSP in Charlotte, North Carolina and a 20-year ConnectWise partner, says he’d like to learn more about both pricing and a migration plan. “I’m interested in that because obviously there’s an operational cost that we have today in where we are with on-prem systems. There’s being able to budget for that, being able to understand what does that migration look like; obviously it’s moving to an OPEX value. What does that look like? I’d love to know.”
A Base Bundle, Single Unit of Measure To Come
ConnectWise Chief Product Officer Jeff Bishop tells MSP Success that they are creating a base bundle that MSPs can then add to. The pricing will be based on a single unit of measure across the portfolio “that is consistent with the way they go to market. … if we can provide them predictability into their pricing as they scale and grow, as well as give them that same unit of measure, the goal and the hope is that that makes their lives very easy and how they do business with ConnectWise. So you’ll see some variations of all that as we roll it out.”
He adds, “The reason we haven’t done it yet is we have lots of new team members here at ConnectWise and the leadership team. And also, we didn’t want to try to rush it out the door and cause confusion with our customers that you’re going to force us to go into this package or that. We’ve got to make sure our sales and our support and our marketing and everybody’s ready when we do this, that we don’t cause ambiguity or confusion or friction with our teams.”
Alan Komet, chief customer officer at ConnectWise, further explains, “People price things on per user, per terabyte, per endpoint. We want to take that out of the mix and make it much more predictable for the MSP. … We’re not ready to speak about the unit of measure that we’ll use singularly across the board, but I think it’ll be industry changing when we do that and MSPs will actually love what we’re picking as that single unit of measurement.”
