Autotask CEO: We Plan To Triple Our IT Management Platform Business In Four Years

It's been a busy time for Autotask.

The East Greenbush, N.Y.-based IT management company rolled out a new user interface, made a RMM acquisition, and got acquired itself. The changes have helped drive significant growth, CEO Mark Cattini said. Autotask is now a company of "critical meaningful mass," he said, with around 350 employees. The company has tripled its business over the past four years and Cattini said the goal is to triple the business again over the next four years.

"I think the market opportunity in front of us is huge and I think my goal would be to make sure that we are focusing our resources in the right places to make sure that we hit those goals," CFO Elmer Lai said. Lai joined the company Jan. 16 to help propel growth.

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Autotask kicked off a series of big moves with the news that it would be acquired by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners for an undisclosed amount. The move has proven to be the right choice strategically, Cattini said, driving scale and synergy since it was announced at the Autotask Community Live event in Miami last summer.

"It's worked well. We are one company," Cattini said of the integration.

Also revealed at the Autotask Community Live event last summer was an overhaul to its user interface, which Cattini said is based on a "human-centric" design. The project, which took around three years to complete, is the "single most strategic thing we've done," Cattini said.

The new UI is much more "elegant" than its predecessor, Cattini said, with modular dashboards, simplified navigation setup and a much more visual design.

"I think this is an industry game-changer, I really do," Cattini said.

Autotask launched the last major phase of the UI rollout last week, with 90 percent of customers now using it. As of Jan. 25, Autotask said 95 percent of users had configured the new dashboards as their homepage, instead of reverting to the previous version. The company also said customers had created 6,654 of their own dashboards for personal use and 21,064 total widgets.

However, it wasn't an easy task for Autotask as it had to forgo feature updates along the way, part of the "opportunity cost" of choosing to roll out a new UI, Cattini said. Partners have criticized the lack of feature additions, but Cattini said the response to the new UI has been 99 percent positive so far.

Most recently, Autotask acquired cloud-based RMM vendor CentraStage for an undisclosed amount in September. Cattini said the company is still integrating CentraStage and is working to roll it out to customers. By "blurring the lines" between the PSA and RMM tools, Cattini said he believes the offering will be much more "powerful" and functional.

"The functionality is just there; its part of the Autotask platform. That’s where we think we can add the most value for our platform," Cattini said.

With the new UI and the CentraStage acquisition, Cattini said he feels the foundation is in place for Autotask. Moving forward, he said the focus would be on "adding value" to the platform. One way of doing that is by rolling out training sessions across the country to help partners take advantage of the new features added this year.

"We think there's a lot of runway in the market, a lot of space and we really are bullish about the future," Cattini said.

PUBLISHED JAN. 27, 2015