Pia Appears To Score In North American MSP RPA Organization
Managed solutions News
Joseph F. Kovar
March 16, 2023, 06:28 PM EDT
‘We seriously want to alter the path of MSPs who have reluctantly let go of getting technologists. … We’re right here to support get rid of the noise, get rid of the service desk ticket, so MSPs can have strategic conversations with prospects and concentrate on much more worth-creating activities,’ says Pia CEO Christian Pacheco.
Christian Pacheco
Bringing Automation To MSPs
A couple of years ago, when Virtual IT Group (VITG), a New South Wales, Australia-primarily based MSP, had problems obtaining a technologies for automating the service desk operations of smaller sized providers like it was, decided to create the technologies on its personal. The outcome was Pia, which is brief for predictive intelligent agent, which permitted VITG to analyze, route, and action repetitive tasks as a way of easing the workload of its service desk personnel.
But then VITG took Pia to the subsequent level and made a separate firm, also recognized as Pia, about the technologies. The objective, according to Christian Pacheco, managing director of VITG, was to bring Pia to the MSP neighborhood to support them with problems connected to automating their processes.
“We located large discomfort points in our organization for the reason that the software program vendors out there had been offering us with platforms that weren’t seriously focusing on the service desk function,” Pacheco told CRN. “And that is exactly where MSPs have the greatest discomfort point, in my opinion. Service desk is constantly 1 of the top rated 3 greatest headaches year-on-year for MSPs.
[Related: From MSP To MSP Tools: Pia Develops AI To Automate Processes]
So VTIG spun the Pia technologies out into a separate firm, also named Pia, and late final year brought it to North America, Pacheco mentioned.
“We seriously want to alter the path of MSPs who have reluctantly let go of getting technologists,” he mentioned. “I assume most individuals that get started an MSP want to really go into their clients’ organization and support them transform their organization or use new and cool technologies strengthen safety. And I assume that is at the heart of what an MSP ought to be undertaking. But these MSPs are just having stuck with firefighting solutions tickets.”
Pacheco mentioned Pia has an chance to expand in the competitive robotic procedure automation space, and remains committed to bringing new technologies to MSPs.
Here’s much more of Pacheco’s conversation with CRN:
1st of all, define Pia.
Properly, it is a complicated query, to be sincere with you. But in its simplest type, Pia is in the end a digital engineer for your service desk. If I wanted to break it down into its most simplest type, that is what Pia is. So in terms of the platform, Pia is an RPA (robotic procedure automation) and orchestration platform for your service desk. And it provides MSPs or enterprise service desks the potential to really carry out tasks, or numerous tasks, with an engineer utilizing Pia. So Pia’s really logging into customers atmosphere, it is responding to tickets, it is logging into customers’ environments, and it is really undertaking the function for the engineers. So if there’s a new user creation request, or password reset, it really logs into Workplace 365 or on-prem and creates the new user or resets the password. It has about 60 automations it does out of the box. And then on the integration side, it is really integrates with most PSAs. Pretty a quantity of firewall and VPN tools as effectively. So yeah, that is what Pia is, and that is what he does.
So you are getting into a space, which seems to have a rather a bit of competitors. Who do you see as your is your main competitors in this?
We’ve got a small bit of competitors for the reason that we’re straight focused, 99 % of our efforts, on the MSP space rather than the enterprise service desk. We do not have an abundance of competitors that is at our level of automation however, but there’s some coming about the corner. So I assume the 1 that sort of resonates with what we’re undertaking is in all probability Rewst. But I assume in terms of exactly where we’re at with our platform, and the quantity of cash that we spent on it more than the final couple of years, I assume we’re at least 18 months ahead of them from a technologies standpoint.
Pia was really founded when?
It was founded in 2018. We really began building the platform in late 2017. We’ve implemented in into our MSP. So you know, Pia is constructed out of an MSP. So I have this MSP named VITG, Virtual IT Group, in Sydney, Australia. We’re a $90-million income MSP, a rather decent size. And we located large discomfort points in our organization for the reason that the software program vendors out there had been offering us with platforms that weren’t seriously focusing on the service desk function. And that is exactly where MSPs have the greatest discomfort point, in my opinion. Service desk is constantly 1 of the top rated 3 greatest headaches year-on-year for MSPs. Regardless of you getting capable to clear some of the other problems, service desk constantly stays in the top rated-3 problems for MSPs.
So we constructed this platform to address that service desk challenge. We implemented it in VITG in 2018, and we’ve observed some large outcomes. We’ve observed a huge uptick in buyer satisfaction. We’ve observed large numbers in terms of ticket instances getting slashed. A ticket that historically requires an engineer 30 minutes to do has now been completed in 3 or 4 minutes. We’ve observed that then led to boosting profitability. We do not have to add headcount each and every time we brought a new buyer in. So we had been capable to retain our current employees and develop without having adding headcount, which boosted profitability. And after we had the platform, we had it functioning in VITG, we didn’t name it Pia back then. We had some other exciting name, we contact it OMLIT, which initially stood for orchestrated machine mastering intelligence tool. We went to marketplace with it final July right after pondering about it six months ahead of. Then the promoting division mentioned we cannot go to marketplace with a solution [whose name sounded like ‘omelet’]. So we really went for a technologies patent utilizing the name ‘predictive intelligence agent.’ And that is exactly where we got right here. We got Pia from that acronym. We’ve signed about 70 MSPs on the platform. So we’ve had rather a bit of results with having MSPs on it.
You began off in Australia. When did you enter the U.S. marketplace?
We entered the U.S. marketplace in October or November, and we’ve had some seriously excellent traction. In the U.S., I assume signing an MSP in the U.S. each and every 36 hours. So managed solutions providers are really taking a liking to the platform. They can see the prospective of it, and what it implies for their future as an MSP. We seriously want to alter the path of MSPs who have reluctantly let go of getting technologists. I assume most individuals that get started an MSP want to really go into their clients’ organization and support them transform their organization or use new and cool technologies strengthen safety. And I assume that is at the heart of what an MSP ought to be undertaking. But these MSPs are just having stuck with firefighting solutions tickets. They’re wasting all their time undertaking all the service desk tickets. And for the reason that there’s such a large load of service requests coming in when they get to have the meetings with their prospects, the prospects are not saying, ‘Let’s speak about safety and what we can do to improve it.’ They’re saying, ‘Why haven’t you fixed the service desk tickets? Why am I waiting 3 days for anything to occur, or 5 hours or what ever it is.’ So as an alternative of a conversation about digital transformation, it is focused on service tickets, which we do not want. So we’re right here to support get rid of the noise, get rid of the service desk ticket, so MSPs can have strategic conversations with prospects and concentrate on much more worth-creating activities.
Is Pia a totally separate organization from VITG?
That is appropriate. We totally detached it 12 months ago. So the employees are totally separate. We’ve got a separate workplace, separate place. It is totally separate.
Pia for now has a pretty narrow concentrate on automation. Are there any places that you could see Pia expanding into later this year or subsequent year?
Definitely. Late this year or early subsequent year, we assume we’re going to be releasing 3 added solution lines. We’re going to release a Pia NOC (network operating center), a Pia SOC (safety operating center), and a Pia firewall. It is not going to be a NOC or SOC or firewall in the physical sense. It is going to be the functionality of help in these functions. For instance, we could do anything like a Cisco firewall. You have got a network operating center or a safety operating center, which is accountable for managing that. We’re going to say, ‘Hey, let use Pia to straight function with these firewalls and choose up events and choose up when anything arises, and as an alternative of really going to the NOC or SOC or waiting for a person to do anything about it, Pia just initiates the playbook. So now, if a person in your SOC is out obtaining a cigarette or lunch or coffee and they get an alert on their telephone, and they’re 5 minutes away from their laptop, often that 5 minutes is as well lengthy. Specially when it comes to safety, exactly where a particular person or individuals attempting to penetrate the network are currently in there planting the seed. You know you are in large problems.
So what we’re education Pia to do from that sense is to recognize, isolate, and resolve previous the basic point of the firewall capability. So that subsequent level exactly where Pia really sends the alert, line in the sand, Pia requires more than and acts as the digital engineer.
You just described firewalls, SOCs, and NOCs. Does that imply Pia is going to do much more with the safety going forward?
Oh, yeah, large time. It is a large concentrate for us. So in addition to really getting accredited ourselves—the platform’s GDPR, ISO 27001, and we’re having our SOC 1, SOC two, and HIPAA this month—besides that sort of safety accreditation ourselves, we really want to play each and every component of a safety function for MSPs also.
Provided your comparatively tiny size in a pretty large marketplace, is there a likelihood that Pia could be an acquisition target by a bigger firm hunting to expand their automation?
Anything’s attainable, appropriate? There’s some large guys out there that would certainly be hunting into the RPA space, the automation space, now. So yeah, I assume in terms of its prospective, it could potentially be a target.
Does Pia function with the large MSP platform players like the ConnectWise or Kaseya?
It is got complete integration with ConnectWise, Autotask, Kaseya BMS. The subsequent releases will have integration with Halo and ServiceNow.
Something else we need to have to know about Pia?
I assume in terms of commentary, what the MSPs need to have to have an understanding of is that Pia is not some flash-in-the-pan sort of plug-it-in-and-pray technologies. It is a platform, and like all platforms, it calls for time and investment to make function in your organization. And if you give it time, you place adequate work into utilizing the platform, be committed to it like you employed to for the PSA and RMM 20 years ago, it is going to be exceptionally prosperous in your organization. We’ve got partners that have been on it now for six months. They’re undertaking 300 or 400 tickets a week with Pia. We’ve got partners that are utilizing Pia for sales tenders. Yeah, they’re placing it in their tenders, saying that ‘our point of distinction is Pia.’ So they’re really utilizing Pia as a sales tool to attempt and win tenders.
