In early February, we will be heading down to Phoenix AZ to attend ConnectWise’s next IT Nation Evolve event. This is an annual membership program designed to help MSPs navigate their business journey through peer group interactions.

CW makes a valid claim that Evolve members “are among the highest in growth and have the largest profitability percentages in the industry.”

We’ve talked before about CW’s emphasis on building a virtuous ecosystem on the philosophy that a rising tide floats all ships. Evolve carefully matches peer groups of 10-15 companies that, while they may face similar business challenges, are not direct competitors. This engenders the trust and confidence to lift the kimono a bit and have open discussions about business performance, business challenges and ways to overcome.

This may prompt you to ask why HyAlto, a vendor, will be there. It just so happens that CW recognizes the role that vendors like us have to play in helping MSPs optimize their entire tech stack.

What does that mean in a practical sense? We have the opportunity at Evolve to be part of a peer group, where we can pitch our monetization platform for the multi-cloud as the solution to many of the challenges that these MSPs face.

The usual course of events is that one MSP in the room will volunteer to take us for a test drive. If the verdict is in our favour, that endorsement will encourage the rest of the peer group to follow suite. There is always the chance of a negative outcome, in which we will have burned a dozen or so prospects, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

And given the size of CW’s ecosystem, it’s well worth the risk (not that we are going down there expecting anything other than a favourable result). It bears repeating that CW counts some 15,000 MSP partners around the world. Many of these MSPs provision VMware and Veeam services for their enterprise clients, both of which we support.

CW does have its own marketplace to help MSPs grow revenues and also offers ConnectWise Sell – a cloud-based quoting solution for MSPs. From a 100,000-foot view, it may therefore appear that there is some overlap here with what we offer. But the fact is that HyAlto offers a client-facing portal for MSPs that CW does not. We also offer usage monitoring and customer billing automation tools that CW does not.

It’s a huge market with lots of growth potential for us, supported by CW’s commitment to building a partner network that includes vendors such as HyAlto. If you recall, back in October, we announced a certified integration with CW for the express purpose of giving its ConnectWise Manage users the means to streamline and optimize their customer billing through automation. In other words, give MSPs the means to address the pain points we hear so many continue to articulate.

We finished 2019 on a high note with CW. In a few weeks, we will report back from Evolve on how the fruits of our labour promise to pay off for HyAlto in 2020.