Challenges

As with any success story comes challenges. Solulan is no stranger to the IT talent shortage that has arrested the industry since COVID-19. It has been particularly challenging for Solulan since robust IT infrastructure has become increasingly essential for small and midsized businesses (SMBs) to scale and profit successfully. The silver lining for Solulan is that although the talent shortage restricted them from scaling at the rapid pace of demand, it allowed them to perfect their service offering and train from within to become exponentially more efficient and specialized.

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Challenges

Prior to Kaseya NOC, a typical day for the Crystal Mountain IT department involved overseeing server and disk management, monitoring the website, patching devices, remediating alerts and troubleshooting common system issues. Plus, the team fielded 140 tickets per day for routine issues such as password resets, new user setups and questions about Microsoft Office. On a good day, these tasks could take up to 2-3 hours of the team’s crucial time.

To help reduce the workload and repetitiveness and to boost morale within the IT department, Shawn started searching for NOC services.

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Challenges

The first and most critical challenge Logically faced was how to consolidate and integrate its bulky tech stack to streamline and optimize IT service delivery. Supporting too many solutions was a recipe for chaos and inefficient workflows. Rising costs were another worrying factor. The company was using multiple solutions from multiple vendors, including Kaseya, which made it difficult to streamline their operations. It also meant that integrations between their solutions were not optimal. After the Logically team evaluated a workflow integration solution that connected Kaseya’s VSA, backup (Unitrends) and IT Documentation (IT Glue) products, and its immediate impact, there was no turning back.

“My CEO and I were challenged with a large variety of technical tools and associated cost drivers due to different acquisitions and changes over time,” said Logically Chief Information Officer Chris Morton.

As a result of its acquisition strategy, Logically has a national customer base that requires 24/7 support. Thus, their second challenge was standardizing the experience across the acquired service desk workforce. Their aim was to deliver seamless service to all their customers while their tech stack underwent a consolidation makeover in the background. The company wanted all its service desk agents to be capable of meeting the needs of customers from any acquisition uniformly and without a hitch. Additionally, it was important that new hires could easily and quickly get up to speed on the process.

“One of the biggest challenges for an MSP that has gone through an acquisition path is finding a centralized support model that allows clients from Acquisition A to receive efficient and effective support from engineers from Acquisition B,” Chris added.

Logically’s third (and most uncontrollable) challenge was how to better cope with industry headwinds impacting all MSPs, such as a lack of qualified talent, customer and talent churn risk, and increasing client expectations. A spree of acquisitions meant that Logically had to deal with increasing demands from a much larger pool of clients. In a post-pandemic world where remote and hybrid work are increasingly common, MSPs are under pressure from their customers to provide round-the-clock IT services. Due to a dearth of tech talent and increasing customer demand, MSPs are forced to do significantly more with fewer resources, and this is becoming an increasing breaking point for many.

“Post COVID-19, with a lot of businesses going more remote, we’ve seen a big shift away from the whole 8 am to 5 pm. In my mind, that’s a thing of the past. Everywhere is 24/7 to some extent nowadays,” Chris said.

“It has required MSPs, including Logically, to step up our game and raise our standards to a level previously reserved for only top-tier clients from specific industries like financial, healthcare and others,” he added.

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Edward Eadeh, CEO of E&E Tech, talks about using VSA to manage 500 endpoints across 25 clients with incredible efficiency. He describes how scripting, automation, remote control and seamless integration between Kaseya solutions have greatly improved his process, saving him a ton of time.

He highlights that even simple tasks, such as uninstalling and running commands without disturbing the end user, are now significantly easier with Live Connect. The company provides services to clients in the manufacturing and consulting industries, which are essentially heavy computing users.

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Challenges

One of the most significant issues that Coastal Computer Consulting faced was their constant need to monitor backups, which resulted in sleepless nights for Adam. Additionally, it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the growing number of workstations they managed and ensure they were patched and up to date. Adam and his team struggled to keep up with patching, rebooting, and turning their nearly 1,000 endpoints back on a regular basis. Additionally, while the business was flourishing, so were the demands on the technicians. Client requirements translated into many nights and weekends on-call for Adam and his technicians. These frequent on-call shifts were terrible for the bottom line and employee morale since Coastal Computer Consulting would have to pay for countless overtime hours even when there was no requirement for technician intervention. Before switching to Kaseya, the team used multiple solutions, such as N-able and GSI. However, they found it nearly impossible to tweak these products to get the correct alerts relevant to them. As a result, they would get flooded by hundreds of alerts in their PSA that they would eventually have to delete.

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A solid foundation is imperative for Credo Technology Group, LLC’s growth strategy and that starts with business operations and client relationships including contracts, ticketing and billing — the core functionalities of a modern PSA.

BMS allows Credo Technology Group, LLC to stack contacts (create default contract and default fallback contract) and keep things modular so they can make necessary changes as needed. “Given that the user count is tied directly to VSA, the billing process is automated right from the posting step to creating an invoice,” said Eric Johnson, President of Credo Technology Group, LLC.

Another key benefit of BMS is the granularity of workflows that allows Credo Technology Group, LLC to customize and modernize its ticketing workflows based on the unique requirements of its organization. “The workflows in BMS are really well done. I love the granularity,” added Eric.

Seamless ticketing with IT Glue, BMS and VSA integration

The strong integration between IT Glue and BMS allows technicians to choose their preferred tool to process tickets. The same ticket capabilities are now available directly in IT Glue as they are in BMS. “In order to resolve a ticket, you first need to access data from your documentation tool anyway, so it makes sense to just stay in the same window. And then you add the capability to run a VSA agent procedure directly from BMS, it really helps our service desk team,” shared Eric.

“With Kaseya, we’ve been able to significantly improve our ticket resolution time. BMS enforces more details in our help desk process, and now it’s easier than ever to find those details and other relevant information with IT Glue,” added Eric.

A tool stack that is well connected and helps everyday operational efficiency has enabled Credo Technology Group, LLC to continue providing its clients with quality services. Automation is easy when you have a tool stack built on flawless integrations.

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Challenges

The previous PSA solution that ReachOut used did not provide them with the support they needed and due to lackluster customer service, their goals were getting harder to achieve.

With their key focus being more successful mergers and acquisitions, ReachOut required a PSA that could smoothly merge different companies and their data into one. The PSA is at the core of their business operations and it is crucial that this system can sustain such changes as flawlessly as possible.

Ryan Luering, Director of Operations at ReachOut, said, “we found that we had to do so much extra work with our previous PSA, just to get it to function as it was intended. There are a lot of steps you have to take while setting it up and it felt like we were putting too much time just in trying to get it to perform ok.” Additionally, Ryan shared that “their system looked outdated, performed in the same manner and was difficult to navigate. The features available were not helping us improve our output and workflows as we’d hoped.”

Ultimately, the decision to switch to BMS was hugely needed for ReachOut to be able to grow in the way they set out to. As Ryan said, “We needed someone on our side that would be able to help us get our data prepared for mergers.”

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As DTS IT services continues to grow, they need a system that can continue to adapt and grow, has the ability to set up a new customer in minutes, and has tight integrations with their tech stack. DTS IT services were evaluating Autotask, N-able and BMS, and chose BMS as their tool.

According to Anthony, “BMS was very easy to set up. I was able to onboard a new customer in under 10 minutes. With ConnectWise, it took me a lot of time to create a simple agreement. It didn’t give me much customization and there were too many checkboxes. Many times, I have to wait for things to load as it was really clunky and there was a lot of manual work I had to do to maintain the product.”

“BMS on the other hand is very straightforward. It is super powerful, fast, and has good custom workflows and synchronization. Adding charges is easy and invoices just fly out automatically. The response time is great in BMS. It’s easy to log time and do time entries. I especially like the granular workflow rules within BMS. If I wanted to set up something like this in ConnectWise, it would have cost me thousands of dollars to set it up.” — Anthony

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Staples-Motley Public Schools is situated in a tight-knit farming community in rural Minnesota. The organization’s Director of Technology, John Tkalcich, grew up in the area but left to pursue his love for technology in some of the world’s most innovative tech hubs, including Silicon Valley, Phoenix and the UK, before returning a few years ago to raise his family and take on the role of managing the school district’s IT systems.

All About Priorities

John’s top priority when stepping into the Director of Technology role at Staples-Motley Public Schools was to significantly improve the district’s tech stack. Being one of only two technicians managing IT for over 1,200 students, teachers and related workers in the area, he knew that efficiency and scalability were the most critical requirements for success. “Having demoed VSA as one of many RMMs on the market, there was no question for me that VSA was by far the best option for enabling my team of two to scale efficiently,” says John.

Prior to deploying VSA as the school district’s core technology solution, each of the six schools in the area had its own unique IT setup, making efficient management of all systems virtually impossible. Having worked in numerous high-functioning IT departments previously, John knew firsthand that tool consolidation and workflow integrations were key to maximizing efficiency. He slowly but surely replaced every unique, orphaned IT tool in the area with a centralized Kaseya product that bolted into his overarching stack to increase efficiency, response time and overall service value.

The game-changer for the Staples-Motley school district was when John added Vorex and IT Glue to the core stack. According to John, “The synergy between Vorex, IT Glue and VSA allowed us to scale our service level to that of a 10-12 person IT department with just the two of us. Also, being able to consolidate (and trust) billing has saved us more than 50 hours per month alone.”

COVID-19 + The Power of Community

Like most businesses around the globe, COVID-19 threw a huge wrench into Staples-Motley Public School’s IT operations. When asked about how his team responded to the situation, John said “Because of the rural nature of the Staples-Motley area, most homes do not have an internet connection, so we had to get creative with schooling.”

He added, “One amazing aspect of living in a close-knit community is that people band together in good times and bad, so instead of delivering kids to school, the bus drivers started delivering school to the kids by dropping off USBs with teaching material and daily breakfast and lunch to every kid in the district.”

While COVID-19 was challenging for John and his team of two, it also served as a catalyst for advancing the Staples-Motley school district’s IT operations by fast-tracking the replacement of things previously done on paper, with devices. At the end of the day, although the area still doesn’t have widespread in-home internet access, with the help of Kaseya’s integrated suites of products, the maturity level of the district’s IT operations has grown exponentially, and they’re only just getting started.

Looking towards the future, John says “I’m thrilled to be working with such a supportive and forward-thinking partner like Kaseya that is committed to our success and riding shotgun with us along the way.”

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It didn’t come without a few hiccups though. As with all massive market changes, the burgeoning IT market caused some businesses in the space to make uncalculated moves in hopes of catching a new wave, many of which didn’t pay off. Kaseya unfortunately tried to ride one of these waves back in 2013 and it took the company in the wrong direction.

“I’m not one to make rash decisions,” said Comeaux. “I’m glad we stuck it out with Kaseya because what we have today with VSA, IT Glue and RapidFire Tools is more powerful than I could have foreseen.” Things started to substantially take off for PDS Networking when Kaseya appointed current CEO, Fred Voccola, in 2015, and transformed the hiccups into an essential suite-based IT platform with over 30 leading products. Since then, PDS has grown from 10 to over 250 customers across Michigan today.

Bringing Organization to Chaos

Having the rare experience of heading up an IT business that has been around for more than 40 years, Comeaux has seen more than his fair share of security threats. He is the first to tell anyone that it is unfortunately not a matter of if, but rather when a company will experience an attack. Like any long-standing, successful business owner, Comeaux, always the optimist, looks towards the final resolution of a bad situation and the July 2, 2021 ransomware attack on Kaseya’s VSA product is a prime example of this.

As one of only .01% of Kaseya customers who were directly impacted by the attack, the first few days following the attack were long and stressful for his team members since they had to keep all of their customers operational with no RMM service. Although their backup product at the time, Barracuda, ensured that no information was lost (and subsequently no ransom paid), the SLA for restoration was over 48 hours long, which was absolutely debilitating for PDS Networking. Thankfully, Comeaux’s tenure and reputation in the industry paid off.

When faced with this crisis, his competitors came to his aid by supporting his restoration efforts with 22 technicians on standby. It was a strenuous few days over what was supposed to be a long, celebratory Fourth of July weekend, but in the end, PDS Networking didn’t just get its customers back up and running; its staff significantly improved service delivery by enhancing the IT systems alongside restoration. “All of our customers are back to 110% of where they were prior to the security incident,” said Comeaux, adding, “We are grateful to have been able to lean on our IT peers and Kaseya for support in allowing us to excel in the face of adversity.”

Having gone through this attack brought the IT Community closer together in Southeast Michigan. Being able to leverage a village to both build and defend IT services is one of the most powerful things the community has running for them, and it would not have been possible without being forced into this unforeseen challenge. When asked how PDS is functioning today, Comeaux said, “Our IT operations are more streamlined and you can bet that we will be switching to Unitrends for full-service backup as soon as possible to ensure that if and when another incident occurs, we have peace of mind knowing that our customers’ data will be both preserved and restored immediately rather than in 48 hours, which is an eternity for businesses.” Comeaux’s innate need to bring organization to chaos proved to not only be an excellent trait, but a transformative catalyst in guiding PDS Networking through this challenge to much higher ground. And the best is yet to come.

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