This year our company was fortunate enough to undergo strong growth, picking up new clients, improving our services for existing clients and tightening up lots of internal processes. Revenue grew steadily but more importantly, profit grew further - we are all really looking forward to 2012. We are based in London (UK), employ fourteen staff and serve fifty demanding clients in Central London and around the world.

I have used RMM tools since 1999, when I was at the wrong end of an enterprise rollout of HP OpenView across a 5,000 user network (not pretty). Since then, I’ve worked with Kaseya and N-Able as well as several of the lower end monitoring products with several service providers.

At the start of this year, as fully engaged ConnectWisers, we took the strategic decision to migrate to Labtech. Of course, we had resistance from our technical team who had got used to doing their jobs with Kaseya and had completed the upgrade to K2. So, why did we change and how did it go?

We knew Labtech’s pricing was competitive and had been tracking this for several months. We visited service providers already using Labtech to see how they were getting on and what the toolset could (and could not) do. We listed our business priorities and how the tools would support these. We checked these assumptions with peers. This collaboration made easier by communities like ConnectWise User Groups and HTG. We sought buy-in across our company to ensure focus and momentum. Finance were happy when they saw the difference between Kaseya and Labtech over five years… The smart technical guys picked it up quickly and loved it.

The sales approach was low key, informed and flexible. I am not keen on discounting but we did get a very good deal. Our sales contact worked into the deal elements to help us run the product (online backup to Doyenz for example) and explore further capabilities (LT backup).

For implementation and rollout we used a low-risk, incremental approach to minimise impact. This followed training (online) via sessions with the Labtech technical team. The logic behind the product is complex and flexible – that’s the dilemma I think for some teams. You can do a lot with lateral, creative thinking and a sensible testing approach. However, if you dive in, you get lost quickly and can make mistakes. One or two of our techs did this, disappeared into scripts, groups and searches and needed their colleagues and a trail of breadcrumbs to get back on track. Labtech can of course help, but your own application of logic is key.

Labtech is clearly focussed on the MSP market – there are lots of little tricks in the product. Think right-click-time-saver. Techs love this and the approach of course relates to the Nemsys origin of some key staff.

In general, if you think like they do things will be easier (like ConnectWise). Don’t try to shoehorn existing processes which may not be that robust/logical anyway (be honest) into the application.

Having been to Automation Nation 2011 and met the leadership team, I strongly believe Labtech is committed to serving our market to a very high standard. They have a great product and a creative, compelling vision. Sure, the GUI looks dated in some areas, but this is not a serious criteria when assessing a tool with this level of impact. This toolset - when engaged with, researched, understood, shared and enhanced with peers - is one of the most powerful drivers of capability, profit and free time you will ever own.