MSPs have spent a decade telling clients to consolidate. Few take their own advice.

Ask any MSP what technology priorities they have, and chances are you’ll hear the word “consolidate”. Even as the number of software tools proliferate, there is an increasing awareness that fewer vendors means a healthier environment.

Fewer invoices, fewer points of failure and fewer gaps for security risks to hide in, equals a more resilient, cost-controlled and risk-managed environment.

Given how the typical MSP operates, that goal can feel like it’s unrealistic. The typical provider has somewhere between 10 and 20 separate programs running at all times. There is a CRM, a quoting system, supplier catalogues, remote monitoring and management, documentation, ticketing and billing. Plus whatever token-consuming AI applications they have running within and connected to these.

Two Australians that have operated at the coal face saw the need to address this challenge, and the result is Atlas Control, which has launched this week. The proposition is a simple, and elegant one: a single unified platform that replaces the fragmented toolkit most MSPs juggle today, offered as one all-inclusive tier. "This brings everything into one spot for everyone," Ash Crowther, Co-Founder at Atlas Control, said. "It makes life easy. That's the point of it."

The real cost of the swivel chair

Fragmentation hurts MSPs in two ways, and the first is labour. Every quote, every onboarding and every renewal involves hopping between systems, re-keying data and reconciling records that never quite match. Research published in Harvard Business Review found the average digital worker toggles between applications nearly 1,200 times a day and spends close to four hours a week reorienting after each switch: roughly nine per cent of the working year lost to changing windows.

And that’s the average worker. MSPs sit on the more sophisticated end of the use of technology, with more applications and processes than the average.

To put the opportunity in addressing this into context, Atlas Control claims a quote that can take multiple hours to assemble across multiple platforms can be produced in five minutes when the data lives in one place.

Onboarding tells the same story. Once a client accepts a quote, they move through the system themselves, entering company details, billing information and direct debit authorisation, while contracts and service agreements generate automatically at the back end. Work that once consumed a technician's afternoon becomes a workflow the client completes over a coffee.

The second cost is the software bill itself. The incumbent platforms in the quoting and management space charge a premium, and Crowther claims teams of 15 to 20 technicians can pay $100,000 to $1 million a year in fees alone. Atlas Control prices at $329 per technician per month, with the company's own remote management software included. There are no modules to bolt on and no tiers to climb.

In fact, as Crowther said, one of the appeals of the platform is that it’s a single, transparent pricing, with no “tiers” to decide between (and scale up through), and no credits to burn through. "What you sign up to, there's one tier, that's it," Crowther said. "You get full access to everything, no matter what. If you don't want to use part of it, don't use it."

The model is a pointed answer to a familiar software industry habit: arrive cheap, win the market, then ratchet prices upward once customers are locked in.

Built at the coalface

Plenty of platforms have promised to unify the MSP stack. What distinguishes this one is where it came from. Atlas Control's other Co-Founder, Darko Reljic is himself the owner of a MSP, running Empreus IT in Canberra with a team of more than 10. The platform was built to resolve their internal frustrations before it became clear that it could be something that supported all MSPs.

Over a four-week beta, the business moved its entire operation onto the platform, onboarding 130 clients in a month. On-site technicians feed suggestions through an internal ticketing system, and most of those refinements have already shipped. It is software shaped by the people who live inside it every day.

The rollout is deliberately measured: Australia only for now, to ensure the platform is built out properly before expansion into the United States and later Europe and Asia, with the next 12 months earmarked for implementing client feedback, feature by feature.

With Empreus IT's challenges solved, the pipeline from here will be shaped by the people using the platform. "Clients will tell us something isn't working well enough for them, and that they'd like us to do this instead," Crowther said. "Being able to implement that is very important to both of us. They are paying clients that want a product. As we scale up, we rectify the bugs and implement the features the end user requires."

It is a fitting philosophy for software born inside an MSP: listen to the people doing the work, then remove the friction.

Atlas Control is live now at atlascontrol.io.