LogMeIn’s LastPass password management product wasn’t even sold through MSPs a year ago, but since then they have redesigned it to fit that market’s needs, signed cloud distribution deals, and now inked PSA integrations as they expand their MSP presence.
Christian Ponce. Director of Channel Strategy for LogMeIn
LogMeIn, which originally built up its LastPass enterprise password management and single sign-on solution through both VAR partners and a free consumer offering, has been aggressively expanding into the MSP market in 2021. The latest component of this strategy is the conclusion of integrations with their first two PSA vendors, ConnectWise, with their Manage Product, and Datto, with Autotask.
“LogMeIn is taking partnerships very seriously,” said Christian Ponce. Director of Channel Strategy for LogMeIn. “We are investing in the team, in the process. We are rolling out a new partner approach across all our products in order to make sure partners will want to work with us. We are building MSPs as a pillar of our strategy, which is core to us and how we scale moving forward.”
LastPass is an established product in the overall market, supported by that consumer edition that serves as a feeder with leads to sales of the commercial product. They are, however, a relatively new player in the MSP space. It was not until 2020 that they built new sub-account functionality directly into LastPass that provided a single view of multiple MSP accounts.
“There is some catch-up involved here, as we are coming into the managed services space late in the game,” Ponce said. “The product wasn’t ready for MSPs at first because it just wasn’t built for that market. We have always had some MSPs in our environment by virtue of products that we sold, specifically our LogMeIn Central endpoint management solution but we didn’t treat them as MSPs, but like any other customer.”
The PSA integrations follow up the signing of recent agreements with cloud distributorsPax8 and Sherweb.
“We originally had about 100 MSP partners, and that had pushed up to around 400 when we signed with Pax8,” Ponce said. They have brought in about 200 since then. The Sherweb partnership went live 2 weeks ago, and so far another 80 to 100 have come in through them.”
The new PSA deals offer MSPs another way to get access to LastPass.
“This gives us MSPs a choice in how they work with us,” Ponce said. “We know that MSPs come in many different varieties, but they all live and die by that PSA integration. The most important thing there is their need for simplicity. We need to slide in so it becomes as easy as pie.”
Ponce said that while password management products made specifically for MSPs have come onto the market in the last several years, with the major ones being acquired by RMM vendors but still selling their products to all, he thinks there is still a fair amount of growth potential in the space.
“Password management is interesting, because while many breaches happen because of a bad password, there has been little focus on it because information security has been focused on protecting from the outside,” Ponce stated. “In addition, while if we competed just in 2FA we would run up against Microsoft, competing in password management makes it seem like green fields.”
The second stage of the integration process with ConnectWise
This LastPass integration with ConnectWise Manage and Datto Autotask is specifically focused on provisioning. Additional followups are planned around both billing and ticketing, with the billing integration letting MSPs automatically charge clients for LastPass seats through the PSA, while the ticketing integration lets MSPs create tickets within the LastPass Admin Console to track their work in their PSA.
“We decided to do it in stages, to make sure we got it out into the market,” Ponce noted. “Provisioning is the most important, and we wanted MSPs to see how easy it is to roll it out. Billing comes later because remember that we weren’t focused on MSP partners at all until last June, and our billing reflected that. Our billing reflected that. We are working on getting the billing right for this market, and we didn’t want to wait till that was done before bringing this out. We wanted to do it right, not just slap something together to say we were in the market.”
It’s likely to be a mid-term rather than short term process until the other stages are complete, a matter of quarters rather than weeks.
Ponce said that their strong brand recognition is a positive with MSPs.
The fourth stage of the integration process with Datto
“Having our strong brand recognition makes it an easier process for them,” he indicated. “We have really driving this flywheel effect of people using LastPass personally and then bringing it into their offices. Many of our MSP partners are great technical people, but often not great salespeople. If we can give them a leg up here, that’s a reason to use us.”
LogMeIn had little reason to be at MSP shows pre-COVID, but they have major plans to attend going forward as trade shows resume their normal rhythm.
“We have just hired a new director of partner marketing for show attendance as well as our own events we will have for MSP partners and prospects,” Ponce said.
The plan is to focus on the ConnectWise and Datto relationships and ensure they are successful before developing more.
“We would like to ferment these and make sure that they deliver on the promise to make MSPs’ lives easier,” Ponce stated. “Going out to others before that is likely diminishing returns. This approach gives us the right options without overextending ourselves.”
