ESET has been building out its presence in the MSP space over the last several years, including an integration with Tigerpaw a year ago. Many Tigerpaw users were not aware of this however, until talking with ESET at last week’s Tigerpaw event.
Gerald Choung, ESET’s VP of Sales and Marketing
Security software vendor ESET was in Omaha last week for the sixth annual Tigerpaw user conference. To their chagrin, they found that even through ESET introduced a plug-in vendor for Tigerpaw a year ago, many Tigerpaw users don’t know about it.
“We had the Tigerpaw plug-in basically done at last year’s Tigerpaw show, but it wasn’t completely finished so we didn’t comment on it then,” said Gerald Choung, ESET’s VP of Sales and Marketing. “Now we are finding out that almost everyone walks up to our table and asks if we integrate with Tigerpaw. We DO! We just haven’t marketed it well enough.”
ESET has been offering its solutions in the managed service provider space since early 2013, when they announced the availability of their solutions to that channel, and launched a Managed Service Provider Program. The Program provided volume licensing discounts to MSPs, and emphasized the use of the RMM-agnostic ESET Remote Administrator.
“Once we started our MSP business, we found that MSPs still had a large challenge,” said Scott Brown, ESET’s Director of Engineering and Services. “Their main complaint was that they had to figure out how many day licenses they had, since they pay by the day and bill by the month. They generally had to do all that by hand. So we went out to the major PSA tools, and built integrations, which sent the daily license type and count to the PSA.”
In addition to Tigerpaw, ESET also has integrations with ConnectWise, Autotask and LabTech.
“We also have a couple more soon to come out,” Brown said. “We aren’t done in the MSP space. We are just getting started.”
“All our MSP-related plug ins have a feedback button, which goes right to my inbox,” Brown stated. “It ensures that the enhancements are all customer driven. We have things like the ability to automatically generate a help desk ticket, based on a criteria of different events or a combination of events, and to set different criteria for each customer or pools of customers. It’s quite a time savings for the MSP.”
Brown said that such changes to these tools based on feedback are common.
“Feedback led to the ability to match multiple contracts in remote scenarios and a distributor environment, and the ability to post packages at different locations. One we just did for Labtech allowed them to trigger on an event and generate a report natively into that. It’s something that is simple to do. but significant to the user base.”
Brown also noted that while many Tigerpaw users are unaware of the ESET relationship, ESET’s relationship with Tigerpaw itself has been an unusually strong one.
“Tigerpaw is the third largest PSA tool vendor and ESET is the fourth largest in our space, in the enterprise, according to Gartner, so we have a fair bit in common,” he said. “With some of the larger companies, it’s hard to get the right person on phone to make something happen. With Tigerpaw, we were immediately turned over to the right guy to talk to, which made it one of the easiest integrations. That doesn’t always happen.”
Choung noted that the Tigerpaw show had been useful for ESET.
“These shows are so valuable,” he said. “People coming up and telling you they did not know we were partnered with Tigerpaw actually does have value. We also have been told a lot specifically about what users need in a plug-in.”
