Anyone out there working with Autotask?

Josh,

I appreciate you bringing up the positive vibes in the community about Autotask. It’s been a phenomenal year with product enhancements and new integrations, which is one reason there has been a big “buzz” in the community. I do take offense at the inference that Autotask hires consultants just to talk up the product in the community. I can honestly say we have no network of people we pay only to speak positively about Autotask. As a matter of fact, I was at the recent ICCA conference where there were four managed services experts speaking about the industry. Three of them use our competitor’s product (the fourth is not an MSP) but all three spoke positively about Autotask in their sessions. The discuss Autotask because they acknowledge it works
The bottom line, is Autotask is making an improvement in the lives of IT service providers, and their businesses.

As I mentioned, this quarter has been a very busy time with the product enhancements, so we probably have been a little behind on blog posts. Much of our time has been keeping our customers updated on our internal Autotask CommunITy, but we are always listening. We are happy to contribute, but as a vendor we try to listen to the posts more than drive the discussions. When we finish 2008, Autotask will have traveled to more than 80 events in the IT services industry. We support the organizations that provide education and other resources to providers like you. Even more importantly, we listen to the likes and dislikes of our customers and prospective customers face to face at these events-and their recommendations show in the product more each day. Autotask has an open API, so virtually any vendor’s (or provider’s) applications can be integrated into our system.

That’s just a couple examples of why Autotask don’t have to “pay” for evangelism in the community. Let us know how you’d like us to contribute more in these discussions.

Brian Sherman
Director of Business Development
Autotask

Hi, Josh –

My bad. As Chief Marketing Officer of Autotask, I need to take the blame for Autotask “going dark” on you.

We do monitor all of the external blogs and communities and try to participate (when appropriate, of course) but for the last several months we have been working hard at building up our online Autotask CommunITy — which is built right into our software — so that individual solution providers using our application have a direct line into us, and each other.

We quietly launched Autotask CommunITy (exclusive access to our customers) six months ago and now have more than 9,000 of our 20,000 users now actively engaged, with thousands of posts and hundreds of thousands of page views already. I’m sure you will agree this is phenomenal level of participation, and members of our CommunITy tell us that we have THE most active and responsive vendor-specific community in the industry. Perhaps some of our customers who read your blog will weigh in on this… and your more broad question about how easy it is to do business with us.

We built our own user Community not to replace the many fine public outlets for commentary and discourse — such as this one. And we fully intend to remain very actively involved in external groups. In fact, our CEO (Bob Godgart) is on the boards of CompTIA, MSP Alliance and MSP Partners, and we are major sponsors of SMBNation, MSPSN, ITA, as well as dozens and dozens of local SBS groups. Our CommunITy really serves a different purpose. We completely integrated it into our hosted application, and created it specifically as a vehicle for all of our individual users to have a voice in our product development process, raise issues, get help (from us and each other) recommend things we should be doing, rant… whatever. We are so dedicated to this new component of our service offering that I have a person on my staff in the marketing department — Jesse Kliza — who’s full time job is to manage the Autotask CommunITy to be sure that we are being responsive to our customers posts — when directed to at us — providing regular fresh and useful content, and otherwise staying out of the way and let our customers drive it.

To clarify one inaccurcy in your post, Josh, we do not, and never have, hired “independent consultants to be out in the marketplace talking us up.”

Other than Jesse, who is an Autotask employee working for me to moderate our own private Autotask CommunITy, anyone else out there “talking us up” are either customers (who pay us, not the other way around) or vendor/partners in the IT services ecosystem who believe in what we’re doing.

The honest truth is that Jesse told me about your invitation to contribute a post for your blog well over a month ago — maybe even two — has been periodically bugging me to do it — I just dropped the ball because of other priorities. In retrospect, I probably should have just delegated it to someone else to write, but I really wanted to do it myself, because I thought it was a great opportunity for us to maybe reach some people who don’t know much about us or our software.

The reason you see Autotask everywhere is because we are 100% committed to the IT services industry — this is our market. Our niche. We have no others. ALL of our marketing resources are focused here.

That means, we live or die with this market. We chose not just to live… but to thrive, and grow, and take this market along with us through innovations that will help solution providers to run their IT businesses better.

Brian -

You missed a great time on the Friday night trek into DC at the ICCA conference btw. Myself and the guys from Calyptix and Matt and his wife went to Fado’s outside of China Town. You guys really should have come, was a blast.

[…] question came up today in the smbitpros blog on how sincere Autotask is in the community.  While we are not a strict MSP, so I can’t speak to their sincerity to the MSP community, I […]

Leave it to Josh to go causing trouble. You should go out to a bar with him sometime - then you’ll see some real fireworks!

Good to see the strong positive reaction to in regards to Autotask - obviously they are building a strong base of fans!

MRC

I have been a long-time Autotask user (about 5+ years now) and have seen the good as well as the bad. I had the great opportunity to actually go up to Autotask’s headquarters last year and speak directly with Bob, Adam, Joe, Jesse, and several other guys (sorry, my brain is full) as well as address the company as a whole. Who paid for the trip? Autotask! Now that’s what I call getting direct feedback from their community base. I know they did this with several other clients/users throughout the year and have really taken a lot of their suggestions to heart. Thus the recent improvements in Exchange synchronization, billing/invoicing, and overall look and feel. There is more of this to come as Autotask tries to shake some of it’s old bad habits and really turn this product into something that can rival global domination.

Love them. Especially like one person mentioned: “They listen to the little guy.”

I actually feel important and I’m an SPF for now.

Being an Autotask customer for over 2 years now, I remember what it was like before the Autotask CommunITy. I made a call in early 2007 saying that I’d switch to ConnectWise if I didn’t get better communication about where product development was headed, and I got good communication over a phone call. But since the CommunITy was put in place, it’s been great, on-going communication! The work that Jesse does and the crazy OT hours that Bob V invests shows a lot about their commitment.

Now if only they’d stop listening to all of the other customers and only pay attention to what I want! Then it would be perfect…

Again fantastic input from the community - I can’t thank you all enough for taking the time to share your experience and thoughts.

JC

Hey Lindsey,

Thanks for reaching out to the community. I am sure many of the Autotask supporters here on our site are willing to speak with you about the software.

We currently use Connectwise and I am more than willing to speak with you about their tool and my opinion on the differences between the two.

Shoot me an email if you would like to setup a time to speak: jclifford@everonit.com and good luck with your search.

JC