Bringing Outsourced IT Services to the Midmarket

Autotask's latest tool, Taskfire, helps VARs make inroads in organizations with an existing IT resource, says the company's VP of channel sales.

By Cecilia Galvin

Sometimes products or services are developed that make so much sense you wonder why someone hadn't thought of them sooner. And that's just what Autotask Corp. has done with its latest tool, called Taskfire, which is sold by the company's partners to larger organizations in which there is an existing IT resource. Taskfire is like an outsourced help desk that enables internal IT staff to escalate problems through their service provider's Autotask system. Jake Carroll, Autotask's vice president of channel sales, spoke with Executive Editor Cecilia Galvin to explain more about how it works.

ChannelPro-SMB: You've said that Autotask uses surveys to find out what its partners need. Is that how you developed Taskfire?

Carroll: Yes. We found that for about 50 percent of our partners, the percentage of their client base that has an internal IT resource is only 5 to 10 percent. So there's a gap. Our partners offer solutions for companies with internal IT resources, but for some reason a relationship is not being formed. In fact, there's a bit of a contentious relationship between the outsourced IT service provider and the internal IT person.

ChannelPro-SMB: So how did you come up with the Taskfire concept?

Carroll: We wanted to better enable our own customers to have a different kind of conversation and business relationship with potential midsize to maybe even enterprise-level customers that have that dedicated internal IT resource. So we provided our partners with a tool they could use with these larger customers. Instead of coming in as an outsourced IT provider to "replace" an internal IT guy, because that is often the fear, they come with a different managed service to help those guys get their job done better. That tool is Taskfire.

Taskfire is an internal help desk tool and ticket management system hosted in the Autotask cloud that our partners can deliver directly to their end-user clients from within their own Autotask system. Partners can provision it, bill for it, and configure it directly. They push a button and out it goes to their client.

Clients can access the software from a browser. It supports Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, and is also accessible from an iPhone. The internal IT person now has this really cool empowerment tool to help handle internal IT issues. Instead of people leaving him voicemail or Post-it notes when they have a computer issue, they send him a ticket that can be managed in the same Autotask system that his IT service provider is using.

ChannelPro-SMB: What are the benefits to outsourced IT service providers?

Carroll: They can have conversations with larger organizations that they haven't been able to reach before, so it helps them with winning business with new clients. They are also getting additional work from existing clients. For example, the internal IT person takes a computer issue from someone in the company, looks at it, and tries to remediate it. If he gets stuck or if it's something he just doesn't have the resources to do, he can push it immediately out to the IT service provider. So in addition to developing a new relationship, outsourced IT providers are also getting more services work from their existing clients.

There are a couple of ways people bring it to market. Providers can bundle it with their managed services offering or sell it per seat like a software-as-a-service offering, depending on the client. We've seen really nice brochures from our partners where they have an entire managed service offering built around Taskfire and have bundled it for one price.