VSR: Please discuss Autotask's mission and vision.
Bob Godgart: Our mission is to drive IT service revenue and profitability within the SMB reseller channel by improving the business operations of each individual company, and by providing a services platform that allows everyone to collaborate with anyone. How do we accomplish this mission? Four ways:
First, by providing individual resellers with a powerful IT Services Management tool that puts all their customer and business information in one place that is accessible anytime from anywhere.
Second, we give them unified dashboards and reports, that them to truly manage their businesses, rather than running by gut instincts or incomplete data.
Third, we provide them with the tools to automate many of the small tedious everyday tasks that were previously done manually, allowing more work to get done without increasing staff.
And fourth, because we are a hosted application "in the cloud" we provide each reseller with the tools to seamlessly outsource or share work assignments with their partners, subcontractors, vendors, and customers, transforming individual business relationships into a smoothly functioning business ecosystem.
VSR: Where do you see the SMB reseller channel moving toward in the next year?
Godgart: We're seeing a greater percentage of collaboration taking place -- MSP to MSP, solution provider to IT service provider and even partnering between IT solution providers and their client's own IT staff.
In fact, our research and customer polls taken within our Autotask Community indicate that each month the majority of our customers partner with at least one to five contractors or other MSPs and IT service providers. And, in a separate poll, we found that 76 percent of our customers work with clients that have at least one internal IT resource.
VSR: Please discuss some of the action items at Autotask's partner conference.
Godgart: The major emphasis at Autotask Community Live!, our customer conference, was to educate our customers and share best practices. We want to keep them up-to-date on the ongoing innovations that we continually put into the software we provide them, and show them firsthand how to use our new Taskfire offering as the means to significantly grow their services business.
Because we are a hosted application, we are able to regularly, and seamlessly, deliver significant enhancements, improvements and updates into Autotask. Yet, we know that our customers are often so busy servicing their clients that they sometimes don't take the time to learn to use these great innovations. So we spent a good part of our event educating and training our customers about some of the "game-changers" that they should be using to improve their businesses.
VSR: regarding trends in IT services automation, what are some of the areas that VARs should look out for?
Godgart: Managed Services and IT service automation is moving to "the cloud" and a hosted Software-as-a-Service or SaaS environment is mandatory for future service growth. There was a lot of discussion about SaaS and cloud computing at Autotask Community Live!.
Since its inception, Autotask has been a hosted, SaaS solution that doesn't require large on-premise computing support or local programming. We take extra precaution to secure our customer's data in a 100 percent redundant environment, yet allow our customers the flexibility to tailor our software to their specific needs using open APIs.
VSR: In addition to being "trusted advisers," what else do end users expect from their VAR partners?
Godgart: From our research, end user companies want reliability and flexibility to work with their MSP and IT service providers on an outsourced basis. End users want to be able to call upon their partner to step-in seamlessly during a busy time period, offload tactical or more labor-intense work, or round out a 24-7 help and service desk. These are all the reasons why we developed Taskfire and it is designed to allow our customers to be that on demand partner for their clients and their client's own IT resources
VSR: Please discuss 
