The company has already enlisted 138 MSPs since an unpublicized soft launch at the beginning of June, and is looking to its RMM being both less expensive and less complex to manage than existing RMMs to drive that number up significantly.
MSP360, which began as a backup provider when it was known as CloudBerry Lab, but has been aggressively building themselves out into a broader platform over the last two years, has formally announced the release of the early access version of MSP360 Remote Monitoring and Management [RMM], their first RMMproduct.
The RMM was originally slated to be released months ago, but MSP360 decided to work on the product a little longer.
“We had it ready to go at the end of the year, and thought we would release in the middle of January,” said Brian Helwig, MSP360’s CEO. “Then we did a small private beta with some MSPs, and based on their feedback, we thought the release would benefit from another 4-5 months of development.” That would be used to bring additional features, like Remote PowerShell capability, in for the launch.”
The RMM then received a second delay, so as not to suck the wind out of the 2.5 version update of MSP360’s managed remote desktop product, which came out at the beginning of June, and which competes with TeamViewer.
Brian Helwig, MSP360’s CEO
“We didn’t make a huge splash around that announcement, because it isn’t as sexy as a new RMM, but we decided that we wanted to see the MSP community to see the changes to Remote Desktop, and not formally bring out RMM at the same time,” Helwig said. “So we decided to hold it until the week before the 4th of July.”
The RMM did, however, receive a quiet soft launch at the beginning of June, and Helwig said that metrics from that are very instructive.
“After that soft release June 1, we had 138 MSPs deploy our RMM with no marketing and with no sales on our part,” he emphasized. “It’s a testament to how easy it is for MSPs to use our RMM.”
Helwig stressed that ease of use addresses the issue of whether the market wants or needs a new RMM, and whether substantial numbers of MSPs will be willing to switch to their offering.
“If you are a current customer of ours for our backup, you already have our agent deployed, so you don’t have to do anything to transition to our RMM,” he said. “It’s just uninstalling the other one.”
Helwig noted that a lot of the 138 MSPs that already moved did so for two reasons.
“Many existing RMMs are too complex, and with the payment systems they use, when an RMM adds a new admin, you pay them more,” he said. “With us, you can designate admins for different functions, and not pay a separate fee for each one. You just open up our RMM management console to manage connectivity. There are no different screens or different workflows. It’s all built inside one platform natively and its really easy to understand the licensing. There’s also no contract, and payment is monthly.”
The second reason is that the MSP360 RMM gives MSPs the core functionality that they need.
“It addresses what they want, like security patches, Windows updates, antivirus management, Remote PowerShell capability, scripting and alerts,” Helwig said. “Over the next three months, we will enhance the platform to adjust to reporting concerns and be more robust on notifications. We don’t have all the mature RMM features – yet – but those will come, with the priority based on what the MSPs want.”
MSP360 is also offering a couple of price perks to attract MSPs.
One is that they get three months free.
“On October 1, they will start being billed,” Helwig said. “In addition, early adopters will get a 20% price reduction for a year.” He noted that one well-known competitor charges around $100 a month, and MSP360’s base price will be ‘decently less’ than that.
MSP360 RMM supports Windows 7, 8.1, 10, and Windows Server 2012 R2 up to 2019.
