SkyKick and ConnectWise Working on Integration

ConnectWise and SkyKick are working together to integrate SkyKick's cloud partner enablement capabilities into the ConnectWise managed services provider (MSP) tool suite.

Craig Fulton, vice president of product for ConnectWise, demonstrated the integration from the ConnectWise IT Nation stage last week in Orlando, Fla. The demo involved using SkyKick Cloud Backup from within the ConnectWise CloudConsole.

Chris Rayner, vice president of product management for SkyKick, said the two companies' engineers are leveraging one another's APIs for a seamless integration that will involve using SkyKick Cloud Backup and SkyKick Cloud Migration Suite as part of the ConnectWise CloudConsole. "It's not like a click and punch-out integration," he said in an interview.

Rayner wouldn't give a release timeframe for the integrations other than "really soon." He did say to expect both the backup and migration integrations to be available simultaneously.

Being included in ConnectWise's product could be a boost for the younger company, which will get access to ConnectWise's large user base built over many years in the professional services automation (PSA) market.

The integration should also help ConnectWise position its partner customers to accelerate their own Office 365 practices, something ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini has been urging them to do for several years. As Bellini told RCP for a feature story in April, "Microsoft is making it compelling for all small businesses, as well as enterprise businesses, to migrate from on-premises to in the cloud Office 365. They're doing it with their pricing strategy. If you look at the pricing strategy, it's very difficult for any company to justify not going to Office 365."

CloudConsole is separate from ConnectWise's flagship PSA product. Designed to help MSPs manage customers in the cloud and become cloud service providers (CSPs), CloudConsole previously included the ability to monitor and manage Office 365 and Azure accounts, as well as bill customers and manage help-desk activities, among other tasks. The SkyKick integrations will extend the capabilities of CloudConsole to customer migration automation and cloud backup.

Also last week at IT Nation, ConnectWise announced the completion of its promised user interface integration for its other top products, as well as new names for four of them. The flagship ConnectWise product is now ConnectWise Manage, Quosal is now ConnectWise Sell, LabTech is now ConnectWise Automate, and ScreenConnect is now ConnectWise Control.

Posted by Scott Bekker on November 16, 2016