"With Automate, we can focus more on how we can increase our recurring revenue and how we can differentiate ourselves in the marketplace.”
– STEVE HEWITT, Infrastructure Architect, Green Duck
With such a wide variety of services to choose from, it can come as no surprise the IT company chose to incorporate remote monitoring and management in to their daily processes in an effort to streamline productivity. “I think it was in March 2014 when we put Kaseya in place on a three-year contract as our first proper RMM tool made for MSPs,” Hewitt recalls. “We were sold the promise that it would free us up — like having a couple extra engineers on the team.” It wasn’t long before Hewitt and his team realised that Kaseya wasn’t the dream product they were after. “We found the usability has been a real problem for us,” he admits. “We’ve got one person in the company who’s done courses with Kaseya — Kaseya certified with Kaseya University. If we wanted script-writing, he was the only one that could do it.” Because that person was the only one able to modify or create scripts, it really limited what the company could accomplish. “It meant that we couldn’t get anything done if this one person wasn’t here.”
Unfortunately, Kaseya’s shortcomings didn’t stop there for Green Duck. “When we had Kaseya in place, you had to buy their antivirus,” Hewitt says. “During our contract, Kaseya wanted to change their antivirus. We then had to remove the old antivirus and roll out the new one at our own cost and our own time.” As if that wasn’t enough, during a particularly troublesome time, the licence key for Kaseya expired, merely a few months into using the product. Clearly an accident, the IT team phoned up Kaseya to rectify the situation and found they couldn’t get a hold of anyone. “It genuinely took me three days — I was calling four or five times a day,” explains Hewitt. “After a few rings, it just went to a voicemail system. We went a couple of days without having an effective RMM. It was unacceptable.”
Needless to say, Hewitt and his team at Green Duck were less than impressed with Kaseya. They needed something that would fit their needs like a glove. It didn’t take long for them to discover ConnectWise. “There were a handful of different tools that came out and all sounded fairly promising,” says Hewitt. “When we all looked into them, they were all pretty narrowly focused. We found that, what was then branded as LabTech, was everywhere. It was widely spoken of, and it was coming up a lot.” After reading the good reviews and the literature, Hewitt and his team were interested in knowing more. “We engaged with ConnectWise and had a few demonstrations which went really well,” he says. “We were really impressed.
As luck would have it, Green Duck received invites to attend IT Nation in Orlando that year. “We went to IT Nation and I was amazed,” Hewitt says. “I was stunned both at what I was seeing in the breakout sessions and at the keynotes. I was thoroughly impressed that IT Nation is what swung it for me.” After returning from IT Nation, Hewitt and his team constructed their plan to integrate LabTech (now Automate) into their business. After installation, the results were almost instantaneous. “Out-of-the-box on day one we got Automate installed and we were getting tickets automatically closing themselves for alerts that were created,” Hewitt recalls. “Things like low disk space on drives and various services that had crashed, Automate had restarted them. We hadn’t done that. That just happened. We didn’t have that working after three years with Kaseya and we had this working on day one with Automate.”
Hewitt was excited about the time and money being saved by avoiding unnecessary engineer involvement. For Green Duck, just one ticket could mean fifteen minutes of an engineer’s valuable time being directed to small tasks. With dozens of tickets like that getting generated a week, it meant significant savings all around. “The savings are vast just on day one,” says Hewitt. In addition, Automate was fixing things as they broke, and often before they went wrong. It meant no unpleasant phone calls with customers and no frazzled techs dealing with repeat offences. It was a win-win all around and Hewitt couldn’t have been happier. “We can do things that we couldn’t do before,” he says. “The product is superb. We absolutely love it.”
We’re glad that you love Automate so much, Green Duck! Here’s to a promising and productive future together!
