Warranty Master CEO Dan Wensley emphasized the important of a more proactive delivery model for MSPs at the IT Nation Connect event, so that they can make more money from the product, as their best-in-class partners do.

ORLANDO – Vancouver-based automated asset lifecycle management provider Warranty Master was in attendance here at the ConnectWise IT Nation Connect event. This year they were a Platinum partner, the highest tier available to sponsoring vendors. The big booth reflects Warranty Master’s rapid rise in the industry, which has seen it grow to now have 6,500 partners in over 20 countries, with over 200 new ones being added every month. Warranty Master was also active at the show. They announced that Multi-Factor Authentication [MFA] is now available in the product. They also used the show to emphasize the importance to MSPs of using Warranty Master in a proactive delivery model, in order to maximize monetization of the product.

It has been a rapid rise for Warranty Master since their April 2015 launch. The company is one of several SaaS startups under the roof of Top Down Ventures and its CEO, former IT Glue founder and leader Chris Day, with Backup Radar and Quoter being the others.  Yet while they are a young company, they are emphatic that they are no longer a startup.

“We are in scale-up mode,” said Dan Wensley, the former long-time VP of Sales and Marketing at Ottawa-based RMM Level Platforms, who was brought in to Warranty Master in June to lead the company to its next stage of growth. “We have absolutely matured past a startup, with that number of partners and the automation that we have. As a company, Warranty Master has seen expansive growth over the last couple of years, because of the intrinsic value of automation. The value it provides is immediately comprehended, even in the free trial process.”

Warranty Master, as the name indicates, provides MSPs with information about warranty status, but its functionality is broader than that.

“We automate the data collection of all of the assets under management for an IT service provider and can display where that asset is in its lifecycle – including where it was purchased, and whether it is under warranty,” Wensley said. “We also provide real-time accurate data to manage an asset’s lifecycle.”

This is something that several RMMs have tried to do themselves but Wensley said that it’s simply easier for a third-party player like Warranty Master.

“Many of the RMMs understand the value of displaying this information, and some have done part of what we do, but not broadly enough to provide the total view that every RMM would need and want,” he stated. “It’s harder for an RMM platform. At Level Platforms, we scoped out a Warranty Master type of solution, but found that it was expensive and hard to monetize for an RMM. We as a standalone application are able to overcome that through the breadth of applications. If an RMM builds something like this, it’s harder to pull from competitors.”

Wensley said that Warranty Master is now integrated into over 25 platforms that supply data. That includes the documentation companies. IT Glue has been an important factor in Warranty Master’s growth. Passportal, which is now part of SolarWinds MSP, and for whom Wensley worked for over four years between 2015 and 2018, is slated for integration as well.

“We also marry into OEM integrations,” Wensley added. “That’s the other part of it. You have to be able to a warranty lookup, to bring back the status of the device from the OEM. We have over 40 of those.”

Warranty Master chose the large Connect event to announce the availability of new functionality in the product.

“We announced to our partners here this week that we have added Multi-Factor Authentication,” Wensley said. It is being made available as an option, with each MSP’s admin being able to decide whether to require MFA for employees, and each employee being able to add it individually even if the admin does not mandate it.

Warranty Master also used Connect to emphasize to partners there that some of them are not getting maximum value from the product.

“We are scaling up the value we can deliver to our partners,” Wensley said. “We aren’t just a data collection application with reporting. We help them sell more, extending warranties on things like servers that are out of date, and helping them do replacement of hardware. I met with partners here to help them use our data reporting capability to justify to customers how hardware needs to be replaced.”

This is a focused strategy, not a one-shot deal, Wensley emphasized.

“We are doing a better job of showing our broad volume of partners what our best-in-class partners are doing to fully monetize us,” he said. “All of our partners love what the product does, but not all understand how to fully monetize it.

“They can monetize us more effectively by leveraging the reporting both internally and as a sales forecasting tool – both internally and outwardly to the customer to help with budgeting,” Wensley added. “They can use us to notify the customer ahead of time that they should be planning to replace something in a particular quarter. They tend to do this now, but not as a monetized service.”

This was the focus of Warranty Master’s sponsored breakout session at the event.

“In our breakout, I referred to this as a proactive delivery model for MSPs,” he said. “We are very good at automating the ticket resolution. but we haven’t done as a good a job as turning the traditional hardware sale into a proactive process rather than a reactive one. Being more proactive overcomes the ‘not in the budget’ argument. In addition, some millennials will expect the  latest and greatest in technology, and a refresh is a great opportunity to provide this.”

Warranty Master will be hosting an online partner meeting in December, a one-hour update to share best practices.