It’s been a few months since I’ve offered you an update on Shockey Monkey. Since last fall the product has been very solid and in a few months we will be celebrating our first birthday!

Over the past few months I’ve been ignoring overjoyed by the amount of interest for Shockey Monkey among software vendors. To be honest, I believe Arnie Bellini (of ConnectWise) deserves more credit for that than I do, but I will take the compliment. While I have listened to some offers (mostly VC) I have not seriously considered any for one simple reason: Shockey Monkey is about you, not us. That’s why it’s free. We’ve helped more people enter the MSP business without spending a dime than I think anyone else around and it’s been my way of saying thanks for putting ExchangeDefender on the map. Personally and truly.

What does one thing have to do with the other? Well, shortly after launching Shockey Monkey many of you told us that in order for it to fit in your portfolio it had to play nicely with the stuff you’ve already invested your money in (primarily RMMs) – so the focus of the first quarter and second quarter has been on developing integrations rather than stuff from Vlad-thinks-this-would-be-cool™ pile.

Which is not as easy as it appears. It’s like dating. When you’re in kindergarten. It’s hard to make a case for someone to integrate with you when you’ve been on the market for 8 months. Yet folks took a chance on us.

I’m happy to report that you’ll see some major integration announcements soon (some are kind of obvious since we’ve actually been at their conferences to demo the product).

Now…

Over the next month or so I’ll be going to three different countries to talk to potential suitors that have shown interest in Shockey Monkey. I think our solution has a lot of potential outside of the PSA marketplace and I want to explore some ideas about my opinion of where the MSP marketplace is going with the cloud.

Like I said, much of the interest has come on the back of the moves ConnectWise has made with their investment portfolio. With each bag of cash they drop, the more complete their solution becomes (which now includes a world class PSA, RMM and a quoting tool) and comparatively puts the other competitors at a disadvantage.

You can’t hate capitalism.

But if you compete with what they acquired you also can’t stand still and just stay in your comfort zone of the solution you’ve developed because the client now expect more than just a point solution and a token integration.

It’s really not so different than the world that the solution providers find themselves in – you’ve got to be the jack of all trades.

Like I’ve said before, we’re not going to be competing with ConnectWise, Autotask or anyone else. I feel they are in an entirely different league and frankly I don’t have the budget nor the motivation to help people learn how to run and build an MSP. My business is the cloud.

But if the licensing of our technology can help fund monkey’s development, bring some features to the market faster, reduce or eliminate the fee for the Pro feature set and help many aspiring MSPs and VARs step up their game… that’s good news for me, you and by tangent even ConnectWise and Autotask. With every Shockey Monkey portal out there, the pool of clients looking for a PSA grows, the utilization and time billing is improved, spending on supporting MSP tools increases and our entire MSP community ultimately benefits.

Or I’m dead friggin wrong and Shockey Monkey is still free to you just for the asking

Who loves ya, baby?

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