Datto turns the spotlight on RMM

Datto has hosted its first MSP Technology Day with a focus on remote monitoring and management (RMM), which has grown in importance in the past few months.

With coronavirus still rumbling on, vendors have had to look to virtual events as a way to keep communication levels high with partners.

Tim Weller, CEO of Datto, said the firm’s first MSP Technology Day has gained 5,000 registrations and it was the first of a planned series of virtual events that would focus on different technology areas.

He used a brief keynote to offer a glimpse of the current impact on the business of Covid-19, with trading conditions showing improvement as lockdown measures continue to ease across most territories.

“Our growth is a reflection of the MSP industry and we have patiently been playing the long game,” he said.

Weller added that after a dip in April, things had started to pick up in May and that trend had continued. “June is shaping up to be getting back to pre-Covid levels,” he said.

“If I had told you on 1 January that 90 days later on 1 April the entire world would be working from home, you would have thought ‘I need to get an RMM’,” he said.

In the past few months, Datto has seen a surge of interest in those tools that enable MSPs to help customers keep on top of a distributed environment.

But Weller was at pains to point out that RMM had already been on the rise before coronavirus arrived. “We thought this was happening anyway,” he said, adding that internet of things (IoT) proliferation had created a need for more extensive management tools.

Bob Petrocelli, CTO at Datto, said security had to be baked into RMM tools, along with flexibility. “It’s hard to change the tyres on a moving car,” he said.

He revealed that Datto’s RMM was handling terabytes of data and 5.5 billion metrics on a daily basis.

Datto presented its fourth annual Global state of the MSP report last week, revealing that the pandemic had caused many MSPs to re-evaluate their growth expectations for the year. Before the crisis, said the report, on average, managed service players were looking for 17% growth in 2020, but after the virus kicked in, 40% cut their projections by at least 10%.

In the short term, revenues might be threatened by coronavirus, but the longer-term changes caused by the crisis should benefit MSPs. Datto’s report found that 57% of MSPs expect the use of on-premise servers for critical applications to decline over the next three years.

The report found that after economic issues, the top concerns for MSPs were cyber security, work-life balance, sales and marketing, and hiring.