Enterprise Times recently spoke to Marius Mihalec, Founder and CEO of Pulseway about a recent update of the Pulseway RMM suite, Siri shortcuts. The conversation concluded with a wider update about the company. First, Enterprise Times asked Mihalec how the company has changed in the last 12 months.
“We grew considerably since the pandemic started, because of the work from home environment, the need for RMM, the need for patching, the need for remote control has increased significantly.”
In a written response after the interview, he sent across some impressive growth figures.
- Latest NPS 73%.
- Pulseway has seen a 35% customer growth in 2020.
- Expanding the team, adding over 20 new hires in the last 12 months for Marketing, R&D, and Sales. Looking to double that by year-end.
- 98% renewal rate.
- 27% MSP endpoint growth with Pulseway, 18% service growth for MSP partners.
Besides the Siri Shortcuts, Pulseway has kept up a regular cadence of improvements over the last year. These have included Network Monitoring, remote control for Apple Macs and a new patch management solution.
Product roadmap
What is on the product roadmap for 2021?
“Loads on the product roadmap. Some confirmed, some not. One is we’re building up a client portal, which will allow our MSPs to extend some capability of the RMM platform to their end-users. We’re starting with troubleshooters, which will allow the end-user to self-service and run some remediation scripts and continue to remote control chat and so on. We’re very excited about that.
“Continue to invest in the network monitoring aspect. We’re taking a holistic approach to IT environment monitoring. It’s not just workstations and servers, it’s everything around it, routers, switches, printers, everything that contribute to the normal IT operations. Network monitoring 2.0 now has the ability to enrol, monitor and even manage, remote control various devices through SSH straight from your mobile device. We are extending that to the cloud. Monitoring and managing various cloud resources, from VMs to DBs, load balancer and so on.
“We have the automation workflows, where you can visually design a workflow. What action should happen when something is triggered. We will bring in cloud monitoring into those as well. So that you can execute a command across environments, in AWS to route traffic if an exchange server is down.”
On product development
Mihalec then gave an insight into how it developed new products in conjunction with users.
“We launched this new Remote Control engine. We’ve been working with the Early Access customers as we rolled it out. We have some technical telemetry to tell us when something might not be working as it should. We have an early adopter customer that had a struggle, we called him 10 minutes after that remote control didn’t work the way we were expecting to.
“He was surprised, like how did you know? We helped him identify and fix the issue. Working closely and keeping a great relationship with our customers and our partners and ensuring that they’re successful using our products is part of our vision. I wanted to make a mobile-first approach to RMM. I found success by trying to do good for our users.”
That approach could come across as a big brother, but I assume you don’t scale that up for your whole customers base?
“Absolutely not. We’re not big brother. We don’t have the time and the resources to become that or the incentive. It’s a focused early access programme on which our customers want to get into, it’s not at a large scale. Once you’re not in the early access programme we are not intrusive with you unless you’re providing us with the logs. For example, you have some agent logs, we’re telling you how to collect them and then report them back to us. Now that’s totally under your control.”
On the future
What do you hope to achieve in the next 12 months?
“Continuous growth, We are on a good trajectory, adding more customers and extending the add-on services that we’re offering.”
How do you see the MSP market evolving?
“We’re definitely seeing consolidation. MSPs came under pressure to deliver a lot more services with the same resources. There’s a clear separation between MSPs that run a very efficient practice. They have very good expertise in all aspects of delivering on the technical capabilities, while others were struggling. The small ones were facing a real challenge to retain their existing customers.
“Looking at MSP challenges in terms of the future, their ability to provide more dedicated services, more in-depth services when it comes to compliance, security etc. A more mature offering, a more complete package will definitely help them succeed. Otherwise, they won’t be able to compete in the market.”
Is that consolidation happening not only through acquisitions but also because smaller MSP are struggling to service the customers and those customers are leaving for larger MSPs?
“Absolutely right.”
On challenges
What are your challenges?
“Our challenge is to make sure that we offer a comprehensive suite of products to our customers, and we keep up with their challenges as well.”
What are your personal challenges for the next year?
“We are growing as a team. One of the challenges is to keep the vision, and for every single new employee that comes in to know why they’re here. To make our customer’s life better, to make IT heroes. Keeping true to the vision and the mission of Pulseway is the challenge as the team grows.
“We are always expanding support, developer, marketing sales. We’re growing in all areas. How do you make sure that you hire and keep true to the vision and stay true to the mission of the company? It’s a good challenge to have, but still, nevertheless, it’s a challenge.”
The book question
What’s the latest book you read?
“Matt Ridley, ‘The Rational Optimist’ (Amazon Aus, UK, US). I think life is getting considerably better at an accelerated rate. When it comes to income, lifespan going up, and child mortality going down as well, excluding the pandemic, obviously, this is an exception. There’s are reasons to be optimistic and look towards the brighter things. Otherwise, if you’re getting stuck into the mundane cycle of bad news that happens all around us you lose sight of the long game altogether.
“I like Simon Sinek with the long gameplay rather than a short term vision of, hey, let’s react to mundane disasters. That affects your clarity of thinking in the long term and affects your positivity. That sucks you into this mundane, struggle and worry rather than keeping the belief that the better things are yet to come.”
