Quickpass is focused on Active Directory and Office 365, just entered into a major product integration with IT Glue, and launched their first PSA integration with ConnectWise.
Jim Jessup, Quickpass co-founder
ORLANDO – Quickpass, a Vancouver-based startup that only launched in July, was in attendance at the ConnectWise IT Nation Connect show here. The company has developed a solution to save MSPs time in supporting password reset tickets and rotating admin passwords. They have also formally entered into a partnership with IT Glue, the market leader in the IT documentation space for MSPs.
Many solutions developed and offered for sale to MSPs were originally a product developed in-house by an MSP for their own use, and Quickpass’s story is close to that.
“This was a problem I had been dealing with for a number of years at my Vancouver MSP, Affinity Managed Services,” said Jim Jessup, one of Quickpass’s two co-founders. “Initially, I had no intention of designing a solution, but Mateo Barraza, my friend and cofounder who owns [Javascript development shop] TailRecursive, had been asking me about coming up with an idea for a product. Both of us knew people at IT Glue and they were struggling with the same issue – the ability to do self-service password resets and autorotation. It was always at the bottom of their roadmap though, so they never got around to it.”
Jessup said that the decision to set up Quickpass and take on this project prompted his decision to sell the MSP.
“Originally, I had planned to do both, but realized that if I did, I would get divorced,” he commented. “So I sold my MSP to Fully Managed.”
The Quickpass solution provides a centralized password reset console for both Active Directory and Office 365. Instead of end users having to call the Help Desk to reset expiring passwords, a process which averages 15 minutes and costs $25 per ticket, the solution notifies end users of the expiring password, so that they can reset their password and unlock their account themselves without needing to call their MSP. MSPs can also centrally reset end user and admin passwords, or auto-rotate them.
The company is essentially being bootstrapped by the founders, through the sale of Jessup’s MSP and through the use of assets from TailRecursive.
“Mateo has a team of 20 developers at his other company, and a small team from there works on Quickpass,” Jessup said. “That has helped with the funding, although Quickpass is now bringing in revenue to pay expenses.”
Quickpass is completely focused on MSPs as their route to market
“We don’t want them to fear that they have to compete with us on price,” Jessup stated.
Their main competitor to data has been Passportal, the Calgary-based company that is now a part of SolarWinds MSP.
“The fact that our main competitor is Passportal goes into why IT Glue is interested in using us to fill in gaps,” Jessup indicated. “Passportal has moved into documentation to compete directly with IT Glue, but they also offer their original password management product. IT Glue customers have been asking them for that, but they haven’t been able to deliver.”
The IT Glue partnership and integration is focused on password rotation. It improves security by keeping passwords fresh with randomly-generated new ones, and updates passwords automatically so that the MSP does not have to do it manually.
“Our partnership with IT Glue is designed for IT Glue customers to get these features so they don’t have to consider switching to a new product,” Jessup said.
In the short term, Quickpass expects that the majority of their sales will come through referrals from IT Glue.
“We have been fortunate to have that relationship with them, because they have over 7000 customers,” Jessup said. “Even if we got just 10% of those, that’s 700 clients. When they first announced this at GlueX last month, we got many requests for demos, which allowed us to raise the profile of the company much more quickly. It gave us a great initial boost, but it’ s up to us to go beyond that. We just launched in June, and still have less than 50 customers. We got 119 good leads just from IT Nation, following up on 66 from GlueX, which was a 400 person event.”
The IT Glue relationship is only one step in a long-term plan, however.
“We see our future as being the Swiss Army Knife of password resets, and integrating with other password managers as well,” Jessup said. “Our initial goal was to be compatible with Active Directory and Office 365/Azure and then IT Glue. We plan to add integrations and improve the product for customers, starting with ConnectWise for ticketing. It is the first PSA tool we have integrated with for this. The goal is to have the main PSA integrations like Datto. We have to be smart about these at this stage, to get a lot of bang for the buck and get access to a bigger market of customers.”
Jessup provided some information on the roadmap looking forward.
“Automating the onboarding and offboarding of techs as well as end users is a priority, which means a general password synchronizer,” he said. “That’s another thing that MSPs look to automate.”
