Those who attended ConnectWise’s IT Nation in-person or virtually saw that ConnectWise Automate only made a cameo appearance during the keynote session. ConnectWise RMM played the lead in the discussion of endpoint monitoring and management tools – and this was no real surprise. ConnectWise has been presenting it as their flagship RMM solution for some time now. What does this mean for the future of ConnectWise Automate for MSPs that are still using it today?
Let’s examine the Unified Monitoring & Management portion of the keynote from November 2023 a little more closely. During the ConnectWise Automate segment, a graphic displayed showing that over the course of 2023, their team resolved over 300 known issues. It also stated they implemented over 80 product, security, and performance updates during the year. They also gave a nod to their Automate partners running over 80 million scripts from what they can measure.
To end the Automate segment of the keynote, Ameer Karim, EVP & GM of Unified Monitoring and Management at ConnectWise, went on to say “We are fully committed to investing in Automate and will continue to do so. We know this community has invested in years of optimizing and customizing Automate to the way you like it, and we want to help you build on it.” Right after, Jeff Bishop remarked, “I keep hearing these rumors about ‘end-of-life’, I think that this starts to put this to bed, right?”
ConnectWise is acknowledging that most MSPs that are using Automate in 2023 have invested an immense amount of time into the tool to fit it into their solution stack. Automate comes with a steep but rewarding learning curve and the MSPs that take the time to understand it and get the engine humming are understandably clinging white-knuckled to it.
There is a lot of fear-based sentiment surrounding the future of Automate as well. After all, it’s expensive to switch RMMs and it’s a huge time-sink to learn a new tool, move solutions over, setup integrations, etcetera – all alongside the normal day-to-day volatility of MSP life. I understand the apprehensiveness about taking ConnectWise’s word at face-value in our ever-evolving industry.
As someone who has used the tool for years and has grown to love both its potential and its quirks, I want to offer a couple of optimistic reasons that I believe we will not see this product sunset anytime soon.
The first is that ConnectWise RMM is still far from having feature parity with Automate – and given RMMs limitations such not allowing direct database access for advanced users, there are some features which may never be 1:1 between the two platforms. A lot of solutions that MSPs have built in Automate do not translate over to RMM yet, and this has been a deal-breaker for them jumping ship.
The second pertains to MSPs that self-host their Automate server. ConnectWise RMM is a cloud-only solution, which is another deal-breaker for certain service providers. Many MSPs support customers with compliance requirements that dictate how and where data is stored and controlled – many times, a self-hosted setup is required to maintain compliance for certain industries. For ConnectWise partners who need to self-host their RMM, Automate is their only option from ConnectWise.
I hope that this has helped to ease some fears. For those using ConnectWise Automate who plan on using it for the foreseeable future and those who might be considering making the switch to ConnectWise RMM – ProVal has a consulting team with experts on both platforms. Consider reaching out to us to see how we can help optimize your ConnectWise Automate or ConnectWise RMM environment or to see our solutions we have helped our partners develop to bolster their stack.
