Connecting The Dots Seeing things past it's face value

I have found myself talking to people about the Kaseya/ConnectWise Executive Summary and when I built it. It sounds funny when I hear from others that Chad Gniffke is saying the same thing, and of course I correct the story by giving the long version as depicted here. Its actually fun to reminisce the good old days.

There was a time when RMM tools were not even thought of, a time when Kaseya was in its infancy, N-Able had their N-Central product as the first product, in reality, to provide centralized monitoring (when it worked )

During this time while I was employed with InhouseIT; Chad Gniffke, Yann Bouan and I were the dream team. This was a time when InhouseIT was a great company to work for, everyone had one goal in mind... How do we become the best???

Prior to this I came from a large company that had many datacenters throughout the world, and one of my responsibilities as Network architect was to monitor closely the portal site that was known as GotoWorld.com, one of the first "pay to surf the internet" MLM/Advertising portals. This company was, I believe, the first company to actually send out real pay checks! This portal site had so many hits and trends that our Webtrends server (massive beast that it was) never could recover from the prior days’ logs. We were using just good old perfmon stretched across several monitors (not the nice space saving LCD screens we have today).

When I joined InhouseIT, an IT Services company out of Orange County CA, I was almost denied a job because they thought I had too much experience. Funny as that was, I believe this started a new wave of services. One of the first things I noticed was the lack of monitoring on the customer machines/servers etc. I flat out could not believe this. Then along came N-Able.

I believe N-Able is the one that really started this RMM Trend. We (InhouseIT) loaded it up on all its customers’ machines and it did what I (we) expected it to do... Sent in alerts (and a crap load of false positives). However one thing was missing - Customer Value. As fast as we were adding customers to the NetManager system, they were dropping off. We simply needed to provide a value statement, and this is where Chad and I thought of combining graphs and metrics to an Executive Summary Report. But how?

One day I was at a large customer of ours searching for a centralized patch Management system when I came across Kaseya. My first thought was ‘Wow this thing is clunky!” as I installed it on my laptop lol. Not knowing anything about the product, I soon realized how powerful this platform was. I started to talk to Jim Alves as he gave me a demo of the product at our office in Costa Mesa. I spent a few weeks and was amazed at the solution, not for the Patch management side of the system, but how I can duplicate my knowledge into scripts and routines! This was my dream come true. Prior to this, as an IT Manager, I was managing these things though complex log-in scripts and batch files for all my customers.

Because InhouseIT had already invested a lot in N-Able, Craig McHugh (Once CEO of InhouseIT) stated he would not invest in another solution unless it had an Executive Summary. I simply told him, "You will have it in 1 week."

By this time I believe Chad had an Excel document he had created that showed a "Weather Report" based on some scoring (a mock up report). We discussed it as it sparked our imaginations, and we started down a path working on an actual report with data collected using Kaseya. We had to show data to the customer as it pertains to Value - "This is what we did for you over the last 30 Days". After all, it was in a SQL database in my server. Although I knew some programming, I was still green, so I turned to Yann who was an intern for InhouseIT and has an extensive programming background. With my direction/execution, we built the first known RMM Executive Summary. N-Able couldn't even touch it. The best part was that with Yann’s help, we completed this report in 1 week exactly. Mark Sutherland, Paul Wong, and Jim Alves then received the report and we showed them what they could also have. One week later we sent them the code. However, I was disappointed because they took our beautiful report and made it look just as bland as the Kaseya system.

We continued to use our report. At InhouseIT, we packaged this report and started to sell it to the True Profits group members. Within this time frame also, I started building a BI Dashboard based on metrics in ConnectWise and Kaseya, (another BI blog later).

Soon afterwards, ConnectWise also received the Executive Summary, which to this day "looks" like the same beautiful summary Chad, Yann, and I built from the start. However that was 5 years ago now. Amazing how time flies! It’s a new day, and there are plans for a much better Value Statement Report, thanks to a few of my friends in HTG14. I have passed on the ideas to my cigar-smoking friends at ConnectSmart as well. Let’s see who can build it first!

Bottom line literally: Think outside the box. Don’t buy an RMM tool and use it for its face value. Expand it and build upon it. That’s what we did, and some continue to do today!