LiveBlog

Autotask Keynote & Product Liveblog

June 12, 2012 , 0 Vlad Mazek

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed our live blog yesterday covering the announcements and notes.. Today we actually get to hear about what is coming from Autotask in 2012/2013 in great detail so stay tuned.

In the meantime, here is the teaser slide Mark Cattini used yesterday to describe what’s coming up.

Looking forward to the details – we’ll be liveblogging it throughout the morning so stay tuned.

8:35: Industry panel discussing trends about managed services, cloud, mobility and how to prepare for the next level. The key point made so far is that the users are more in control of their IT investment from the cloud choices to bringing their own devices.

8:48: Joe from mspmentor is asking about whether the focus should be on reoccuring revenue or the “killing the partners are making providing consulting” – good question, where is the money? The panel agrees that all the reoccuring revenue drives project revenues and project opportunities.

9:11: Vince from Anchor Network Solutions says “I know we’re going to make money from projects. But I see young people that don’t need me to setup their Office 365 or their SalesForce for that, so how are we going to make money from positioning solutions among this simplicity” – IMHO, the panel fumbled around a bit and never quite answered it because.. well.. the ugly answer is kind of obvious.

9:14: “According to some research, 40% of MSPs will be gone soon due to the cloud attrition. So the question to the vendors on the panel is: What are you looking for from the partners?” – Everyone agrees that it’s all about partners that can add value or own the relationship. Best answer so far though: “It’s easy to assume that we are all on the same page in the channel.. but when I go out on the road we see people that are all over the place in terms of services they offer.” Even better from Len: “I have been in this since the 80’s and I’ve seen the channel die 100 times. The key is in evolving.”

9:20: “I am unable to find the talent because I need someone that is a jack of all trades, master of none” – the panel is saying that it may not necessarily be a time to hire talent but find vendors that will provide it for you. Outsource. Partner.

9:24: “Snack, dine and cook.” great analogy from the podium about what is making mobility so popular. You use your mobile to get information quickly and on the go – with your mobile device as a snack. But when you want to do something really important and creative and focus you sit down at the desktop and cook.

9:30: Vendor panel on industry trends is now wrapped up. Product team is up next and the room is now packed.

…..

9:33: Stats galore: In the month of April, Autotask handled 125 million page views. Peak bandwith of 2.4 TB data. Stored 1.5 TB. Store more than 22TB worldwide. 2.5 million emails. Received 5.2 million emails – 1 email per second sending, 2 emails per second receiving. 1.5 million new tickets and closed 1.4 million tickets. Created 27,000 opportunities worth $425 million opportunities, closed 15,000 opportunities worth $140 million. Sent 140,000 invoices worth $160 million. The key point: Autotask is a realtime mission critical application.

9:37: Trailing 12 month uptime is 99.998% in US and 99.97% in Europe. 100% uptime in China . Total planned downtime in 2011: 4 hours. 87 people dedicated to improving reliability and the product. Capacity of over 50,000 person hours per year!

9:52: Product roadmap time!

9:54: Prioritization, multilateral & multi-channel. How does Autotask do what it needs to and what the users ask for. “There is a surplus of good ideas and we can’t get to them at once. So we prioritize. There are 2,500 feature requests since it was started a few years ago.” Showing over 400 completed customer requests or 2 requests per week.

9:56: Planning process. Process is not about focusing on features but on addressing problems and finding solutions not point features.

10:02: Next 3 releases: Note to follow “Friday Coffee” webinars on Friday where Autotask takes 30 minutes to address a particular problem with Autotask. About 175 clients have attended it and maybe a dozen are aware of it.

10:04: June release focuses on Workflow Engine, Project and Task workflow, LiveMobile notifications and Client Portal and Taskfire. Comes out in 2 weeks. Lots of enhancements in the Workflow engine. Granular triggers when tasks run behind schedule to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. Showing off the power of fully automating the entire process of delivering the service.

10:14: Email-to-Ticket incoming email connector in September. You can create multiple incoming inboxes that trigger specific workflow rules.

10:17: Techs can reply to email-to-ticket with their time entry and status updates. Also works with techs, clients, task emails and projects.

10:21: Project scheduler, enhanced security and new quoting and sales updates. Next up, project schedule and inline editing.

10:22: Roadmap pipeline, several releases ahead: Improved security with granular account-based data access, object level permissions, etc. Multi-tier company structure, line-of-business classification so you can filter service activity by line of business. Problem management (aka, Master Tickets) tickets that are associated with the same root problem and manage/allocate resources to central ticket that addresses the problem (tickets will have sub-tickets under them and perform bulk updates to the master ticket and applied to all the subtickets). Ability to consolidate and merge tickets with redundant data.