Pia CEO Gerwai Todd said the company is hyper focused on automation in its platform, helping MSPs eliminate mundane tasks and increasing net profit, getting ahead of the competition.
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Pia CEO Gerwai Todd is focusing on more and more automation and helping MSPs eliminate mundane tasks to increase their margins.
“Where I’d like to see us 12 months from now is a product that is doing good work to help reinvent the MSP business model,” he told CRN. “What I really hope in 12 months is that the MSP industry sees that there's a new way to operate and that MSPs of the future are going to have to find ways to use automation to increase their margins.”
Todd, who was appointed CEO of the Tampa-based automation company in January, has a long history in the channel. He’s a 10-year veteran of ConnectWise and has run and sat on boards of multiple technology companies in his tenure.
He is also currently the CEO of TimeZest, a software company helping MSPs schedule meetings seamlessly by integrating with their PSA. He maintains dual leadership roles with both Pia and TimeZest but the companies will remain separate and supported by their respective executive leadership teams.
However, Pia is integrating with TimeZest to provide MSPs with the seamless ability to categorize tickets in Pia. The integration benefits existing and future Pia and TimeZest customers by bringing together more workflows and processes with the goal of promoting more efficient, effective and client-driven MSPs.
And he’s eager to work the problem that the team has been trying to solve.
“I'm most excited about getting back to some of my roots,” he said. “I find that some of the best ideas and solutions come out of an MSP. We also get this amazing value of having that MSP lab that we can work with the team, test things and we can really understand what's happening in the business on the ground.”
CRN spoke with Todd about what’s to come for Pia, automation and how the company is helping MSPs.
How will you balance being CEO of both Pia and TimeZest?
Imagine if you're running a company that has worldwide teams, it is no different. I have a team in Australia and we have worldwide team members throughout both companies, and I just have to work longer days.
What's your strategy going forward to scale Pia to the next level?
We're laser focused on building the right thing for MSPs and solving the key use case that we've really targeted, which is how do you automate and simplify some of the work that hits a helpdesk. There's just a lot of monotonous administrative work that can hit a help desk and we'd like to take, what I'd call, level one or some level two issues and streamline the processing of those. So taking something we'd have in documentation, we put in IT Glue or other documentation systems and move it into a system. So when team members are looking to execute a function, like a password change or setting up a new user in Microsoft 365 or whitelisting, or blacklisting an email address, we can do those by the push of a button.
AI has effectively matured to the point where it can really do a good job of identifying the type of problem we have, prompting a technician to let them know, ‘Hey, we think we know what the problem is here. Do you agree?’ and guiding them through clicks of a button through the quick automation of those changes. One of the key things that we've seen, as an example, is we've had MSP owners come to us and say, ‘I've got a team of five techs. They're great. They all do great work. We've got documentation in our documentation platform but they all still process the task slightly differently.’ To really drive that consistency, we have to take what's in documentation and be able to systematize it, and that's effectively what the Pia team has done.
Rest of interview on CRN:
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