Between the much needed interface tweaks, the single pane BDR management, MDM, the Ignite service for helping new MSPs get immediate value right out of the box, to the stuff that's coming down the pipeline (TBA) the guys at LabTech are killing it!

I've heard grumblings about poor support, but let's seriously put that into perspective - just what, 3 years ago, LabTech had I think 7 employees? Now they are over 130 and have the backing of Connectwise to not only propel them financially, but also with best practices in development, support, strategy - and none of the other RMM tools out there are owned and ran by people that truly understand what IT Service Providers need to address the ever changing and expanding needs of our SMB Customers. Rapid growth is definitely still a problem, but they are putting the resources behind support to help their clients - but they aren't mind readers and at the end of the day YOU will only get out what you put in. If you are a lazy MSP who expects to click a few buttons and watch the money roll in, well, you probably won't be in business very long, but you may get a RTFM type response.

The new onboarding is probably one of my favorite features. You turn it on, and it discovers what types of servers your client has and then applies the appropriate monitors and adds them to the appropriate groups. No more ugly template or manual onboarding.

There are still some rough edges in the interface, but its nice to be able to fall back to the old interface if you can't find something in the new streamlined interface.

We have been with LabTech Software since 2008, and I must say the 2012 release and the offerings/services around it, are the BEST offerings they’ve brought to the table thus far. The product upgrades itself is nothing short of amazing. UI changes, enhanced speed, tunneling stability, are just a few things that have really made a huge difference in our usage of the product, and overall perception of how great their product is, and not only how far they’ve already come – but where they are going – and in the right way…

Other vendors could take a lesson from this up and coming pioneer of the RMM space, because it’s very evident they are listening to their Partner base, and making changes to their processes and products based on the needs of the Partner base. Their Support, Documentation, and Training resources are more fortified than I’ve ever seen in the past, and the few questions we’ve had have been dealt with swiftly, correctly, and with the professional courtesy one should expect from a software provider. Another lesson other vendors could learn from.

We are ecstatic about what they’ve brought to the table across the board, and can’t wait for the next innovations that will directly make me more successful – and not just a competition to have newest technologies that you often see everywhere else.

Keep it up Matt and Greg – you’ve done some incredible things in a very short period of time.

Great for managing workstations/servers. HORRIBLE for managing Switches/Routers and other SNMP managable devices. The network probe used for these features is a joke. The problem is the sales people told us that it would do all the things we had in our old product (WhatsUp Gold) yet it didn't. I'm only referring to the switch/router management/monitoring portion. The rest is good.

I'd second what Mark is saying.. I've read some reviews and had concerns about support while reviewing the product. I sort of ignored these as you obviously get competing firms bad-mouthing each other.

Anyway, I've had an engineer evaluating Labtech and I've been pulled in a couple of times. The level of service from the sales guy we've been dealing with is like nothing I've ever experienced, i.e. cocky, bad-attitude, failing to come back when promised (a couple of times), dismissive, avoiding important functionality questions.

This is the first time I've ever felt the need to comment about a company... I've never, ever seen this behaviour at a sales level. I wouldn't like to think what the support service is like.

I am actively looking for an RMM solution. I've read many many reviews of LT. The way i read it is the product is on a whole deep and detailed but is flawed with poor support and promise after promise that this will be resolved. It seems (if you read the dates of posts complaining about the support problem) that the support issue is never resolved.

Get this, (this is a joke I'm afraid) i talk to sales, i ask a bunch of questions - sales guy cant answer them so tells me he will set-up a conference call so we can go through my list of pre sales questions - we agree on a time for the LT techs and him to call me...... call never comes and yes my phone is/was working because i checked just in case ( now its far fetched my phone would suddenly go down but hey i decided to give the LT guys the benefit of the doubt - i had several people phone in to make sure all was well).

So reading all these poor support issues that keep on coming and the fact sales cant be bothered to honour an agreement on a tech phone call.... I'll pass thanks. Does not mattter how much *potential* a product has, if it is not supported we will be in trouble sooner or later...why should i drop 20K to get poor service? Going to check out N-Able now

Move on folks...nothing to see here.......

Exec Summary: If you are an MSP, and want to improve capabilities, support customers more invisibly, speed up new client implementations (I just implemented a 80 seat client w/ the labtech agent doing most of the client side work), and reduce costs (toolset and labor), choose LabTech.

We've been on 3 prior RMM vendor platforms before switching to labtech. We don't tool hop too much, but we've been and MSP for 12 years now. The 1st tool was new, I mean Indian New in 2002 when we hopped on as the 1st MSP they had as a client. It was growing pains x 10 to say the least. We integrated another product that was later bought out by Dell that could never live up to the promise or price tag (amazingly they still sell this dog, at a very high price tag). After 3 years, there were finally some real alternatives out there and we selected a expensive, but capable product that served us well for about 5 years. We noted LabTech at a trade show in 2010 and followed up on the product, test drove it, and pulled the trigger early last year. After having used 3 other RMM tools (actually 5, but 2 predated the rmm term) in production, and test driving at least 5 other major vendors I think I probably know more about RMM tools than most anyone, if for no other reason than most MSP's haven't been around long enough to suffer through 3 major RMM tool migrations. I mean, it is painful to change, so most avoid doing so. Onto the review:
If i had to do it over again, we'd still go w/ LabTech, but I'd pay for their implementation team to do the install and deployment. I would also have gotten training earlier in the game than we did. LabTech does so much that it is hard to know where to start sometimes. The reason we changed was because of the vast capabilities. You don't really know how powerful it is w/ just a test drive in a test environment, you have to get it and use it supporting clients day in, day out. One of my employees is a Microsoft Scripting MVP, he can make this thing sing. If I had one gripe, it would be reporting. Now, the canned reports are fine, but the scoring methodology, depending on the report you use is, well, dopey. I'm actually on a support case now trying to figure out how to adjust things and get a more accurate summary of client statuses. That leads to discussing support. I've probably opened a dozen or so cases. Response is as expected, usually same day if I open a call soon enough. I have noted that support has improved over the 10 months we've been using labtech in production. So, kudos to their support team. There are growing pains to be sure, and LabTech is probably more bleeding edge that we'd like sometimes, but on the flip side, we see all sorts of capabilities that are just coming online w/ other rmm tools. It's worth the tradeoff. Other reviews talk about all sorts of errors, bugs, etc... Sure, we've even uncovered a few ourselves, but that is just RMM tools in general. None are perfect. My advice: Focus on what you need, then what you want. Oh, pricing: Very competitive. There are cheaper options, but so far, all the cheaper options are less capable. If you price shop the major rmm vendors, LabTech is actually towards the lower end of the scale. We have over 1000 machines managed by LabTech currently and will be buying more agents in the next month or two to handle additional customers.

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.

We started with Zenith as a small firm but after awhile we realized it was limited and gets expensive. We did trials on most of the stuff out there and settled on labtech. I am now sure we can grow, keep costs down and make happy clients.

The software is heavy duty and we took the implementation services to help. They asked about our systems and did a good job of giving us a running server. Darren I think was the tech, and he went out of his way to make sure we were on a good plane. There have been a few issues with configuring some scripts we want, but its a learning curve for sure. It's solid, runs flawlessly and we couldn't be more pleased.

I think if you want a RMM to have complete control over this is it. You can make it alert anything, at least what you can make money off of. Happy over price and install, now we gotta light fires under sales team (me).

I've been a user of LabTech for approximately 18 months. It was a big change to get used to the interface, permissions, and the many tabs spread through the system. As far as the value of the product, I'd challenge you to find another RMM that provides the integration points, the flexibility, and the ultimate ease of use as LabTech.

As far as setup goes, once the system was setup and running, it took us a long time to really get our heads around the layout of the system. This was a bit of a frustration and why I dinged it a couple of points in setup. Sure the installation for the software itself was pretty painless, but group setup, best practices, and template inheritance was not without struggles to fully understand.

Once we understood how the product was designed and we became aware of the limitations of the software (sticky groups, limited groups, inheritance, etc.), we became much more productive with LT. I will also say we brought in an outside consultant to further assist us in maximizing our investment in LT. That was extremely beneficial, and I'd happily make that decision many times over. My understanding is that the consultant we used now works for LabTech in an effort to improve the "out of box" experience as well as provide continuous enhancements to the RMM toolset.

Over the last 18 months, we've submitted several support tickets. Some were basic functionality questions, others were more significant systemic issues we encountered. Based on the last 3 months, I'd actually rate the support very differently from my fellow users here. I can tell you that I get responses for non-critical issues within 24 hours in almost every case, and generally the responses include troubleshooting steps, code samples, or alternative solutions to accomplish what I'm trying to do. Sure, they close a ticket if you don't respond in 72 hours, but we've started doing that ourselves with our end clients. We just reply to the ticket once we have the answers they requested and the ticket re-opens.

I had one technician resolve an issue with a 3rd party product without my assistance. LT and I had a scheduled call setup with the 3rd party. When the 3rd party wasn't available at our scheduled time to discuss a resolution, the support tech worked the ticket on her end to resolution. She then provided me with an email and voicemail that contained the solution from the 3rd party. I can't say that I've received that level of care in the past, and I don't know that I'll receive that level of care in the future, but I do know that one call made a huge impact on me as a customer and as a service provider to my end user.

Of all the features, my favorite is the level of customization the product affords. The redirectors are incredibly powerfull in that nearly any 3rd party app that creates a sustained network connection can be integrated with LT. I've got 3 technicians who used dameware at a previous job - they raved about the stability, low cost, and ease of use. We've run into a couple of issues with VNC, in particular around multimonitors when the primary monitor is not the left-most monitor. For a minimal investment, we deployed dameware as a backup desktop connection tool to LabVNC for remote support. Very straight forward, and very cost effective.

From my interaction with the LT team and from watching their new hires, I know they are actively working with MSPs to determine what features and tools will be most beneficial to their users. They don't sell directly to end-clients, and they are working to streamline the product from a usability standpoint. Their support is on an upward trend in my book, and I don't know that I could ask too much more out of a service provider.

I've been with Labtech for almost three years. In fact I've used them since before they were even big enough to make it into the arena of public awareness. There was a day, when, if I had a problem, I emailed Greg, and the next day I would get a new build of the software with the bug fixed. In those days, every time I did something, I found a bug (almost). The cool thing was I didn't mind because I felt that there was a company that stood behind their product, took ownership of issues, and fixed them - in a very timely manner.

I regret to say that the whole company has changed since the infusion of ConnectWise capitol. I can't prove that it is related, and, to be honest, it was going downhill before that too. I guess the disappointing thing is that support hasn't gotten any better since then. Documentation has improved, quality of releases has improved (a lot), but support is completely a joke.

I've had tickets closed that weren't even close to resolved. They take over a week to respond to a ticket, but then close it because you don't provide them some detail of info in the first 72 hours. There escalation process is completely lame. First level solves very little, and is just there to give you the feeling that you are talking to someone who thinks they know what they are doing.

I would actually prefer fewer features, and a company that really, truly stood behind it's product. I would prefer a product that was less "functional", but had a support team that KNEW how to work the features it did have. I'm tired. I'm tired of trying to make it work. I'm tired of spending hours troubleshooting issues that I should never be dealing with. (logo's on reports, anyone?) Last week I spent a solid day just trying to figure out why I had duplicate product keys in my product keys list. I don't have time to do this, Labtech. Give me a product that works, and a company that stands behind it with five star support.

I've invested nearly $10,000 into this system - not much but still significant to me. There are days when I feel like throwing it down the toilet and buying on with somebody that has a support department where I can get on the phone with somebody WHO CAN HELP ME. In fact, support is now my #1 requirement for ANY software product. That's at the top of the list.

Labtech, it's time to decide which game you are playing. And play it well. I don't need a salesman to tell me your support department is in it's final ramp up stage to something awesome. I need an engineer to fix problems (without having to complain to upper level management first!).

Labtech is a pretty amazing product - but the support is worse than horrible.

I can honestly say that 100.0 % of the tickets that I have submitted in the last year have not been answered in the first submission. What usually happens is one of a couple of scenarios: either the ticket is ignored totally requiring me to open multiple tickets for the same issue or the ticket is closed without a solution. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have to BEG for support. My favorite is that they will direct you to their forums for support … and then close the ticket… or offer you a solution that you have already tried and you told them that you tried this in excruciating detail in the ticket… they don’t read the ticket and are utterly unhelpful until you scream at them and actually get someone on the phone. This usually takes about a week or so… if at all.

Why am I paying for support then?

We just went through the upgrade from 2011.1 to 2011.2 and had some pretty heavy issues and errors. We now see approximately once per day that every monitored device will go into an error state for a few minutes and then report in again as being back online. Let me tell you that that will get your attention. The other thing that we see is that the agent will just shut down for no apparent reason. This will cause a server-down alert and also block your access to the server unless you have an alternative path for management.

I have to say that the vision of this product is pretty spectacular – but it isn’t ready for primetime just yet. I have reached out to LabTech many many times and I get the canned response that we have just added (fill in the blank here) resources and we are getting better blah blah blah… the truth is that they will not support you without your persistent chasing and hounding them for a solution.

If you are fluent in SQL and scripting you may be able to survive without the support – in which case I would say go for it. But if you are like the rest of us slobs trying to be a solution provider to customers in the SMB space and you don’t have a staff of 20 people you may want to look at some of the other solutions out there.

The RMM space has expanded substantially in the last couple of years, and while no tool will be all things to all folks, I would strongly recommend that you take a long hard look at the support that is available behind the product and not just the feature list of the product.

I can say that I have partnered with several MSPs and we all use LabTech and we are all experiencing the same issues – we are begging LabTech to step up and support the product. Stop giving us hollow promises that you will do better in the future. Lost the cocky attitude and answer our phone calls. Stop adding features to the feature list and start supporting the product that you have today.

Great product when it works updates are a crapshoot to install properly.

We've been a Labtech client for over a year, and their software is the core of our MSP business. Their rate of growth is phenomenal. While we have had support issues in the past, they've taken steps to improve what was a well-known weakness, and are well on their way to making it a strength. The leadership and continued development of the product, their willingness to listen to their userbase, and their commitment to their product is second-to-none. I've used Kasaya, Zenith, Commitwise, Autotask, and about 100 other glued-together solutions, and find Labtech to be both comprehensive and customizable. With access to the underlying data, there's no barrier to integration, and their partnership with and suppoort of other products (Various ativirii products, Doyenz, Commitwise, etc.) demonstrate the integration potential perfectly. Combine this with one of the lower barriers to entry in this marketspace, and by my criteria you come out with a winner On the downside, the user interface needs some design love, and the upgrade process isn't all it could be. I have no doubt that both of these are being addressed as resources permit. All-in-all, I'd give labtech a solid 8 out of 10.

We have used the product for over 2 years now. Every time they come out with an update and we install it, we have nothing but errors. In some cases the update broke the server. Last update 2 weeks ago was installed and we Re still waiting for resolution to all the errors it created. Support has been nonexistent

I have to say that I have been surprised by some of the previous comments.
I looked at the functionality of Labtech and the pricing structure and have found it very good on both.
I would prefer the reporting to be editable without the need to purchase/install yet another software, and would also like to have seen a network mapping tool included, but on the whole this is an excellent product for the price.

With regards to support...everytime I have had an issue, I have recieved support very quickly and the level of support has been excellent.

Do not purchase - do not buy into the hype. It is a very new product that needs a LOT of work.

Unfortunately there isn't a "quality control" rating. If Labtech has a weak point it is in testing and quality control, IMHO. Support is responsive, but we have been told on numerous occasions that a particular issue is fixed in a maintenance release beta, but after installing it, we have to reopen those tickets because it's not fixed. In version 2.5 several scripts didn't work out of the box, and as I recall ones for things like Java (v6 update 8? was included) didn't work with the current Java 6 updates 15 and above.

We upgraded several 2.5 releases without issue, but after upgrading to version 2010 we discovered that several of the built in scripts don't work, since they reference groups that don't exist in non-clean installations of 2010. There was a logic error in the "automatically restart a stopped service" script that opened a ticket saying the service had not started if the service HAD in fact started (and it couldn't be corrected/saved because a group name it referenced didn't exist). For the 2010 installer there is a checkbox on the installer to reset the "theme" for the web site to the default. It does that even if the checkbox is unchecked. The Blacklisted Application alert will flag an application and immediately send another alert that the app was removed. Monitoring for the LTBackup program (ShadowProtect) regularly sends false "backup failed" alerts and Labtech shows incorrect schedule information in the computer's view. If anyone is intending to allow a client's IT staff to log in to use VNC, say, note that the Messages and Monitors windows allow all users to view a list of all client names, and the PC names at those clients. The Exchange Server and Exchange Server 2007 searches use the same test so show the same results (instead of differentiating versions).

You get the idea...there seem like a lot of little issues that would have been easily found and resolved with a basic level of testing.

Im currently looking for an MSP / PSA /RRM and i continually find it odd, that labtechsoft gets such a plug and other MSP's are degraded online, i get the feeling there are some employee's of labtechsoft rubbishing other products because i cant seem to find many reviews of other products which don’t instantly say afterwards..

"but we tried labtechsoft and they are super human"

I think any MSP implementation initially is going to be a headache, but if you're going to write an honest review you surely wouldn’t instantly plug another product after you have just dropped 25k? I want to point this out I have no affiliation with ANY MSP, im a customer looking for an MSP without a STUPID pricing model. Why should I have to negotiate to get a price for an MSP? I just want a dam price not some “you may get ripped off if you don’t haggle” approach! It leaves me with a sour taste before ive even had the chance to look at the product. I have looked at labtech's reporting tools and they are hopeless, i have looked at n-able's pricing and i can't figure out why the hell they say a price and when you get the contract it shows more? Because of xyz they didn’t explain clearly when doing the sales pitch. Kaseya seem to have a bad rep but they also have more users because they have been in the market the longest, and as we all know in IT you only hear about it when it goes wrong.

What im saying to you is be wary of all the positive hype people say about labtech, i strongly get the feeling its employee's not honest reviews, if it was honest why don’t people mention how ugly the GUI is, or compared to n-able how average the reporting tools are??

N-able to me seems to be the better product and their support seems WAY better than labtech soft which leaves me weighing up the cost because they for us are an extra 12,000 than labtech? Not to mention ongoing?, but N-able lacks 2 features which labtechsoft have 1. a desktop ticketing system 2. history logger.

N-Able is quite pushy in their sales which i dislike, but they seem eager to give support which is important when dealing with a product like this. I feel labtech support is average, even speaking to a sales and asking to speak to a tech regarding technical issues, has turned out to be hard, i have asked several times to speak to a tech and i havent spoken to one yet, i just get a sales person full of promises with minimal information about technical aspects.

I think its interesting Connect wise has bought into labtech and nod32 is also partnered or looking to with labtech because both have good established companies.

So I’m lost in decisions but it’s important for an honest opinion than these BS reviews.

I w ill try to give the good and the bad here. The good is that it is a Fat Client product that really w orks w ell out of the box and so far, has FAR more capabilities than any other RMM we have tried (N-Able, Kaseya, Hound Dog/GFI, LPI, Zenith). The web based products can't even compete in the performance
and functionality area. You are literally into an server, seeing logs, executing scripts, and running a rich report before you even get logged into a site or node on one of the Web based systems. This is the reason we like the Thick Client for MSP, WAAAY faster and more robust.

We have found Labtech to be very stable, but it does have some shortcomings in my book. We are a Autotask shop and have found the integration lacking a bit compared to the Connectw ise integration. If you use Connectwise, I cannot even understand why you would use any other system, period. For us our PSA is much more important to us from a business perspective, that Connectwise is not even an option. It seems Labtech has not done a single enhancement to the Autotask integration in almost a year and this troubles me.
With that said, the LT/AT integration is good enough for now . We were told that they will be enhancing it, so I am holding them to this (Matt if you are reading this, I know Connectwise invested in you guys, but there are alot of potential Autotask clients that you cannot turn your back on).

The bad is also for some, that Labtech's Web interface is a joke, w e never use it for anything other than deploying clients. This does not bother me, since I am fully sold on the Thick Client for reasons I stated above. The client works similar to Connectw ise's client does over HTTP/HTTPS, this is new to the 2010 release and it w orks flaw lessly.

Reporting in my opinion is hands down, second to none. The flexibility to customize your own reports layout and content is only limited to your wilingness to learn the industry standard Crystal reports. I love this about Labtech and I really hope they stick with Crystal. It is the most flexible robust reporting solution out there. And if you w ant custom reports, its the only way to go.

Scripting, without going into depth, you have to see it to beleive it. IMHO, blows Kaseya (The former scripting champ) out of the water. The only thing is that there is not the huge catalog of different (of ten useless) scripts that have been created by the user community like Kaseya has.

More bad, the system is not w ith its bugs. Currently there are a few big ones that are being addressed, and in my opinion, a little too slow . But in all fairness these are with functionality that does not even exist in most systems, and they do put out regular releases.

Finally, I w ill end w ith my wish list. I think the fact that Labtech is a relative new comer to the field, gives them a disadvantage in the Website/Support Forums. There are very of ten important issues or questions that go unanswered by their staff for weeks and even months at a time. The community and the website need a serious facelift and redesign. On the other hand, their Wiki is very informative and seems to be maintained fairly regularly when new functionality and releases are out there.

My final conscenus is that with the release of 2010 last week, Labtech technically is the most robust and feature rich RMM out there. It is by far the best most af fordable product on the market (No ridiculous pricing or overbuying tactics served up by N-ABLE, Kaseya, and LPI). In fact even if Kaseya were priced less than Labtech, I can honestly say that I w ould not budge. Kaseya and N-Able HAVE to be shaking in their boots. Labtech just needs more traction so things like a Community and Web Site get enhanced and monitored more. I also w ish they would work more w ith Autotask, but I understand with the Connectwise investment that may not ever happen and that is a damn shame.
I easily give Labtech 5 stars, and anyone who has not looked into it and done a trial at this point is really doing their company a major disservice, coming off of Kaseya or N-Able, it is instant ROI.

I created a video show ing Labtech and Autotask running great off my iPad, I have resorted to using my iPad almost exclusively when I am on the road, this has been totally liberating and I actually have saved alot in cost avoidance since I now arm my techs on call with iPads and we were able to get by without hiring an extra tech.

The Video
https://www.mspboard.com/view topic.php?f=18&t=934

Awesome piece of software.