ConnectWise thinks adding ConnectWise RPA to Asio will be a really big deal, although they also announced a new Asio workflow automation capability, and 18 new Asio services.
Jeff Bishop, ConnectWise’s Chief Product Officer, onstage
ORLANDO – At their IT Nation event here, ConnectWise highlighted the evolution and future of their unified Asio platform. In particular, they focused on the role of highlighting robotic process automation (RPA) with ConnectWise RPA, a new service that uses hyperautomation to simplify the creation, deployment, and management of software robots. It is available now in the ConnectWise Asio Platform.
ConnectWise launched their unified Asio platform two years ago to provide a broad Platform-as-a-Service solution for the IT channel ecosystem, consolidating multiple products into a modern user experience driven by hyperautomation. They have now added their existing ConnectWise RPA solution into Asio, to help partners overcome client challenges while simultaneously reducing labor costs.
“It centralizes data into one store where you can do hyperautomation,” said Jake Varghese, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Business Management, at ConnectWise “Hyperautomation isn’t just a feature of Asio. It is a core.”
“We can set up automation to handle all repetitive work in seconds, which creates a massive difference when onboarding or offboarding dozens or hundreds of partners, particularly when dozens of different applications are involved, Jeff Bishop, ConnectWise’s Chief Product Officer, told the keynote audience. “It removes repetitive work that your team does, that they shouldn’t have to be doing. We are not just stitching together integrations. We deliver a modern user experience, building new products faster and creating automation across the entire ecosystem, so partners can focus on business instead of integrating services together.”
Bishop noted that ConnectWise RPA now has 130 types of bots available, and that the numbers will continue to grow.
“We now have 130 and are adding three or four every week,” he said. “That’s just the tip. It’s a really great solution to help everyone save time and improve efficiencies. Those 130 bots cover 60-80% of what we were asked to do by our partners. The key for them will be whether they want to build a workflow to address an issue, or whether they want to use bots or whether they want to combine them. There will be some interesting conversations around that over the next 6-9 months, about which tech stack best solves a specific problem.”
Before ConnectWise RPA, partners who wanted to use bots pretty much had to purchase a solution from one of the RPA vendors on the market. Now, they no longer need to buy standalone RPA products when using ConnectWise, and with ConnectWise RPA as a new core component of Asio, access to it will be easier for them.
“As organizations are tasked with doing more with less in today’s economic environment, bringing RPA to our Asio platform is a logical step in providing greater operational and cost efficiency to our partners and end-users,” said Jason Magee, ConnectWise’s CEO.
In addition to adding ConnectWise RPA to Asio, a new Asio workflow orchestration has been added. The visual workflow orchestration feature users can automate across multiple ConnectWise products and third-party solutions and seamlessly integrate their most frequently used tools with intuitive drag and drop functionality where new conditions can be added to the canvas.
“This new AI workflow engine is based on top of Asio with an ecosystem of vendors, many of whom are here today,” Bishop said.
Bishop, who has responsibility for Asio, indicated that there were 18 significant new services and tore through most of them at breakneck speed in the technology keynote. They included updated authentication services with support for Duo, Okta Azure and others, a new custom authorization service, and a new Asio global search
“As part of our new UI, we also introduced dark mode, and over 10 language translations available today,” he said.
“We have revamped the Asio ticketing screen, in what is really a complete revamp,” he noted. “It is working for the Asio RMM now, and will be in the PSA in the first half of next year. Our SOC, NOC and Help Desk are moving from some big enterprise products to this. I’m really excited about that.”
Other new services include a new notification service, which is now on email, and will soon be on Teams and others, a revamped Asio Marketplace, a new RPA chat box, a brand new end user portal, and the new workflow engine.
A new unified billing and ingestion service has Bishop particularly excited.
“You can bring in APIs and map them out, and it will soon give reconciliation information to see what isn’t mapped,” he said. “I love the unified billing and ingestion. We will open it to every MSP in order to help the community. In the future, I think that’s going to be a game changer.”
