ConnectWise Keynote recap from IT Nation Connect Asia-Pacific 2022

This was our second IT Nation Connect event in Australia and the first since 2019. We were so excited to be back in person in Australia. More than 550 attendees, 30 solutions providers, and many industry thought leaders came together to discover MSP business-building insights. 

Fellow members of the ConnectWise leadership team discussed the current state of our industry in the Asia-Pacific region and the broader global economic landscape, talked through the trends and challenges we’re seeing and hearing from our partners, and highlighted the progress we’ve made and will continue to make on delivering on our promises to partners. 

Check out the exciting highlights from the IT Nation Connect Asia-Pacific 2022 keynote address or watch the full keynote here. 

Partners grow with ConnectWise programs, programs, and services 

Over 1,000 ConnectWise partners in the Asia-Pacific region are using our products and services. Most are showing significant growth in their business, and the forecast is optimistic for above-average growth. ConnectWise continues to expand our team in the region—from 4 colleagues in Australia a year ago to 18—because we are dedicated to improving your ConnectWise experience.  

From IT Nation Share events and IT Nation Evolve peer groups to ConnectWise University, we continue to invest heavily to share meaningful resources that help drive success and transformation within your businesses. 

ConnectWise product, service, and company updates 

1. ConnectWise Acquires Wise-Sync! 

We were thrilled to share the news about our acquisition of Wise-Sync, the industry’s cutting-edge payment integration service that offers tools like Wise-Pay, a payment automation solution, and Wise-Sync, an end-to-end accounting platform. Sharing this news in Australia, where Wise-Sync is based, and with local partners on-site, made this moment even more special. 

Wise-Sync and Wise-Pay have long been available to ConnectWise PSA (formerly Manage) partners, and now partners using ConnectWise CPQ (formerly Sell) also have access to Wise-Pay as a payment processor, enabling them to fully automate payment collection as their customer approves the quote. Wise-Sync and Wise-Pay are available today in the ConnectWise Marketplace. We encourage you to learn more in this blog post and consider registering for a live webinar with Wise-Sync on September 6. 
 

2. Asio platform 

Asio, our modern platform with unmatched performance, scalability, and cybersecurity, was at IT Nation Connect 2021 in Orlando. Our vision for this unified platform is to enhance rapid innovation, enabling you to work more efficiently and take engagement, differentiation, and customer satisfaction to another level. 

In the near future, all of our products will be built or deeply integrated with Asio. During this process, we’re also reimagining how the user experience works to give you a powerful workflow engine— from tech work to billing. In every aspect of your business, you’ll have solutions that help automate processes, effectively grow, and achieve your most ambitious vision of success. 

Lastly, we’ve listened to your project management feature requests, so we are excited to share that we are reconceptualizing project management in Asio. Our goal is to provide the tools you need to create and efficiently manage engagement throughout the project process with your customers. Our initial release will consist of project templates and a project work plan. 

3. Cybersecurity 

The threat landscape is changing rapidly and becoming increasingly complex. At ConnectWise, we make it our responsibility to track cyber criminals so that you don’t have to. Our vision is to become the trusted cybersecurity partner for IT solution providers (TSPs) and equip them to protect and secure their businesses and customers while building profitable and growing cybersecurity practices.  

Here are a few highlights in our cybersecurity portfolio: 

• The ConnectWise Partner Program team focuses on helping partners build and accelerate their cybersecurity business with technical, marketing, and sales readiness. Just a little over a year after announcing this program, participating partners are growing their cybersecurity practice nearly five times faster than those trying to do it themselves. 
• ConnectWise Risk Assessment allows you to quickly assess endpoints in your network and scan them for vulnerabilities. Additionally, you can do a scan to see if any usernames or passwords of your customers’ organizations have been published on the dark web. Finally, it looks at email SPAM setup to see if any gaps make it too easy for spammers to abuse email. 
• Cybersecurity solution sets for ConnectWise PSA are shared templates that you can customize to your specific needs. This solution set includes templates to standardize incident response plans and onboarding processes for new customers and a template to help create a central location to capture and classify security alerts from various security tools. 
• ITBoost standard operating procedures (SOPs) support growing cybersecurity practices, including incident response and information security policies.
  

4. Unified Monitoring and Management solutions 

With ConnectWise Unified Monitoring and Management solutions, our vision is to help TSPs create a single source of truth through unifying, automating, and securing technology solutions.  

Recently, we have released updates in many areas, including improvements in our custom monitors, PSA integration, alerting, patching, reports, intelligent monitoring alerts, virtualization management, and others. Over the last six months, we have released more than 450 updates to ConnectWise RMM. This is the power of Asio in action, demonstrating how we can rapidly deliver innovations to you. Here are some innovation highlights: 

• New Microsoft Intune and Microsoft 365 Business Premium integrations allow users to see key device and compliance information for Microsoft Intune for multiple client tenants on the main device management page. 
• Patching improvements across devices 
• Communicator updates now allow end users to create tickets. Users can also send messages to end users from the communicator page.

5. Business Management solutions

ConnectWise Business Management helps TSPs save time and money by making the entire TSP lifecycle seamless and efficient. This enables you to focus on taking care of customers and staff while growing business profitability. Our Business Management vision is to help accelerate digital transformation for partners and their customers. Here are some ways we are doing this: 

• With our new round-robin feature in ConnectWise PSA, users can free their techs from scouring the service board. You can define a round-robin team and Manage auto-assigns tickets. 
• SmileBack is the only customer feedback system specifically designed for MSPs, focusing exclusively on customer satisfaction (CSAT). CSAT, net promoter scores (NPS), and reporting tools empower you to drive your business with abundant, actionable feedback. CSAT and NPS reports can be scheduled and automatically delivered to the right people on your team.  
• BrightGauge, a ConnectWise solution, now includes a SentinelOne integration that takes you beyond the reporting capabilities available within SentinelOne alone. You can create more detailed reports using SentinelOne data and then combine it with other BrightGauge data sources for more holistic analytics. 

6. Master product catalog

We are also updating our product catalog to create a “master product catalog” that covers information about hardware, software, and services in one place. Products from Etilize and trusted vendors will be included for TSPs that need a way to sell, procure, track, bill, monitor, and replace products to run their businesses, and it can be managed from the Asio portal.