Joe over at MSPMentor.net, my favorite blog that talks about the Managed Service Provider market, wrote an article today about what questions a MSP should ask about the APIs their RMM and PSA vendor provides. If you don't know what RMM or PSA stands for, I'll clue you in. RMM stands for Remote Monitoring & Management, and is typified by companies like Zenith Infotech, Kaseya, and N-Able. PSA stands for Professional Service Automation, and in the context of Managed Services, companies like Connectwise and Autotask are the big players.

Recently, there has been competing announcements from these companies about the APIs they provide and the 3rd party software that they hook into. While these announcements are great, I still don't think the APIs are anywhere close to where they could be. Joe is right when he says, "the MSP software provider with the best API strategy could emerge as the Windows of managed services — ubiquitous, and sitting at the center of an emerging software market." While the Remote Management & Automation tools will continue to incrementally improve and adapt, it seems that they are all good enough across the board. There are feature differences, but all of these software packages are pretty much offering the same thing, patching, remote desktop, scripting etc.

Currently, the APIs seem to be offering the same thing as well. They can move data from, say, Reflexion Email Filtering into Connectwise for billing and reporting purposes, but things should be moving much farther forward than that. The first company that can offer the ability to create a new company/user and automatically provision those users into Reflexion (or any third party service) for email filtering will be at a huge advantage. I don't see any reason why we can't provision new domain names, backup services, spam filtering etc. from our PSA software.It would truly bring automation to Professional Service Automation.

The current workflow for technicians to setup a brand new company on managed services, frankly, sucks. I think the big RMM and PSA vendors know it, and they are scrambling to create full featured APIs that are easy to develop for. It will be extremely interesting to see what the RMM/PSA world looks like in 2 years, it may be a completely different landscape.

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