Plasma Power Image by Menno van der Krift from Pixabay Pulseway is celebrating another successful year with customer growth, new product releases and industry recognition. 2021 was a year where MSPs came under pressure with growing concerns around security, exacerbated by the growth of homeworking.

This was a record year for Pulseway, with customers growing 37% worldwide, 2% higher than the growth in 2020. Marius Mihalec, Founder and CEO of Pulseway, commented. “The past year was one of tremendous momentum and innovation for Pulseway, and I am excited to head into 2022 with the continuous support of our customers and talented team that we have built so far.

“In the last 12 months, we have achieved new product heights, launched new features and doubled our team. These changes have helped us attract larger partners, as well as improve the efficiency and performance of our existing customer base.”

Andy Ellwood, VP, Product Marketing at Pulseway
Andy Ellwood, VP, Product Marketing at Pulseway

Enterprise Times spoke to Andy Ellwood, VP, Product Marketing at Pulseway, about the company’s momentum. ET asked him if he could share any other figures. As a private company, Pulseway does not share revenues, Ellwood answered:

“We’ve more or less doubled the staff. We’ve increased our development side and account management to improve the service to the customers, so they’re handling fewer customers each.”

Where is that growth? Ellwood said that the growth is becoming more evenly spread. Despite 70% of its customers being in North America, it is still growing there, and after a greater sales focus, there is more success in Europe. That success is mainly in the UK, a strong market for Pulseway, Germany and the Nordics, where it has a successful distributor, Upstream. There is little growth in Southern Europe.

A Focus on security

One of the stand-out statements from the release was, “The past year has been dominated by security concerns surrounding RMM software, and Pulseway’s relentless focus on delivering a secure platform has meant that no incidents have been reported involving its software or customers. “

ET questioned Ellwood about this. He clarified that Pulseway had caused no incidents. He also added, “We are not aware of any customer that’s had a security incident through Pulseway.” The recent Log4J issue did not affect Pulseway and Ellwood commented:

“There’s always been a focus on that (security). We are enforcing 2FA, in more places, on accounts where people can do serious things, they need to have to 2FA invoked. Going back over a year to the SolarWinds attack that was caused by open ports, we don’t have any inbound open ports. This to do with our architecture.”

On growth

Enterprise Times asked Ellwood what Pulseway’s growth ambitions for 2022 are:

“Carry on growing. We had a very good year in revenue terms; maintaining that momentum. You’ll see some more integrations. We know we can’t do everything ourselves. We will be prioritising some more integrations with software that customers use.”

Ellwood wants customers to use Pulseways as their single pane of glass for RMM. Has Pulseaway added many distributors this year to help that growth?

Ellwood replied: “Not really; it’s something we keep talking about focusing on. We have Upstream in the Nordics that do quite well and Chillisoft in ANZ. We haven’t been actively recruiting for distributors.”

It is something that Pulseway should consider. They already have distributors in Austria, Denmark, Mauritius, and The Netherlands. Adding a few more might accelerate growth.

On product

Pulseway believes that much of the growth is down to the product’s strength. Which was the focus of the answer Ellwood gave to what the biggest achievements of the company were in 2021.

“We did two major product things. The client portal was something new for us, and it’s something that we spotted as a gap in the market. Also, taking what we believe is the strongest Automation Engine in the industry and making it better and easier to use. We’re focusing on getting customers to appreciate the power of automation. We think it’s a very solid piece of technology, and people who like who use it, really like it.

“In 2020 we surveyed MSPs, and MMEs asking do they use automation? About 30% or 40% of the IT department said ‘No, I haven’t got the time to work out how to use automation’. Some MSPs said their customers didn’t let them use automation. We’re trying to evangelise the power of having auto-remediation and stuff like that. The work we did on that is a solid foundation and (we want to) get more people using it.”

Pulseway tripled performance for its Remote Control Engine for Windows and macOS. It also launched Siri Shortcuts, which enabled the RMM solution to be the first to become voice-enabled. ET asked Ellwood what the roadmap looks like for Pulseway RMM?

He didn’t disappoint, replying, “You’ll be seeing some enhancements to the client portal to make that easier for bigger customers to roll out. As I said, integrations will be a big theme of that. You’ll be seeing some more support for MacOS in terms of scripting support and certainly around the patching towards the end of the year. This is something that customers are asking for: improvements in reporting. Starting with some new templates, then moving into a whole new reporting engine.

“We’re very happy where we are technically. We will spend a lot of time making it easier for people to use and embrace the product. There’ll be changes around policies. We will be making enhancements to make it easier to establish policies and rollout across larger environments because we are seeing that interest from those large customers now, and we are winning them as well.”

Other achievements

Pulseway has had a good year. It also received some industry recognition RMM/PSA Vendor of the Year – Channel Partner Insight Awards and Best in Mobile Cloud Solution – Cloud Awards. It no longer maintained its leader status as a SoftwareAdvice Front Runner for Remote Support Software, a category it led in 2020.

Mihalec added: “I am extremely proud and excited to close 2021 with such honourable industry recognitions for the transformation, growth, and evolution of Pulseway RMM in the past year. This would not be possible without the continuous support of the IT community and valuable feedback of our customers for which we are extremely grateful.”

However, with strong growth and a solid product roadmap, it may climb up and return to the top spot.

Looking forward

Enterprise Times asked Ellwood about his predictions for the MSP sector in 2022.

Ellwood replied: “It’s definitely going to grow. You could see some people cashing in their chips and looking for mergers and acquisitions. People are talking about the great resignation. It could see some people moving into the space because they’ve had enough working for someone else and want to work for themselves.

“In the last few months, a noticeable trend has been customers saying that they have an MSP, but they’re bringing it back in-house. It is a bit surprising, as you’d normally expect to go the other way. I think it’s becoming easier. Because a lot of our MSPs deal with small customers, they’re the ones that don’t have the time or the budget to have their own internal IT resources. The MSP area is going to be strong for those smaller customers.

“Security is going to be the growth area because that’s worried those smaller companies who can’t cope with managing it and the worry about ransomware attacks.

“When I started my career, we used to employ our own security people. You don’t do that anymore. You outsource security; outsource the cabling. The MSP market continues to be strong. We’ll see some minor wobbles in the middle, you know, in different sectors. But I think security will be driving a lot of that MSP growth.”

Enterprise Times: What does this mean

The growth of Pulseway is impressive. While it has not yet hit the heights of 40% growth, it is not far off. Doubling the team in 2021 might help growth tip across the 40% line 2022. However, it should seriously consider looking for a more formalised distribution approach in foreign countries. The success in Sweden that Ellwood alluded to should become a template for other countries.

The other question is whether Kaseya will help boost that growth with further investment. Pulseway has continued to perform under Mihalec’s leadership, and if it were privately owned, one suspects, it would have VC’s queuing up to help it accelerate.

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