Monthly Archives: February 2017

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Certainly there will be taxes that relate to automation. Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things, declared Gates. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, youd think that wed tax the robot at a similar level.

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There are many ways to take that extra productivity and generate more taxes. Exactly how youd do it, measure it, you know, its interesting for people to start talking about now, he continued. Some of it can come on the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there. Some of it can come directly in some type of robot tax. I dont think the robot companies are going to be outraged that there might be a tax. Its OK.

Gates added that you ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed of that adoption somewhat to figure out, OK, what about the communities where this has a particularly big impact? Which transition programs have worked and what type of funding do those require?'

You cross the threshold of job-replacement of certain activities all sort of at once, Gates concluded. So, you know, warehouse work, driving, room cleanup, theres quite a few things that are meaningful job categories that, certainly in the next 20 years, being thoughtful about that extra supply is a net benefit. Its important to have the policies to go with that.

Billionaire and entrepreneur Mark Cuban also claimed robots are going to cause unemployment, posting, Automation is going to cause unemployment and we need to prepare for it, to Twitter on Sunday.

Last week, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk warned that deep A.I. could potentially be dangerous to the human race, who he described as already part-cyborg.

One of the most troubling questions is artificial intelligence. I dont mean narrow A.I deep artificial intelligence, where you can have AI which is much smarter than the smartest human on earth, proclaimed Musk during the World Government Summit in Dubai. This is a dangerous situation.

Pay close attention to the development of artificial intelligence, he continued. Make sure researchers dont get carried away. Scientists get so engrossed in their work they dont realize what they are doing.

In November, Musk also predicted that automated robots would lead to mass unemployment, which he claimed could eventually create a universal wage from the government.

Charlie Nash is a reporterforBreitbart Tech. You can follow himon Twitter@MrNashingtonorlike his page at Facebook.

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Bill Gates Calls for Robot Tax to Offset Jobs Lost to Automation - Breitbart News

In a chat with ET Now, Anand Deshpande, MD & CEO, Persistent Systems, Kavi Arya, Pl, e-Yantra Project, IIT Bombay and Pari Natarajan, Co-founder &CEO, Zinnov, discuss the big picture in the IT Sector and how echnology trends are creating a disruption in the business model and the talent also have to keep up with it.

Edited excerpts

When someone says AI, I only have robots in my head. It is like a motion picture. What is AI all about? Deconstruct it for us because this is all jargon?

Traditionally when you looked at artificial intelligence, the idea was let us go figure out what the human being does and sees and if we can get a machine to replicate that. So there have been various techniques that people have used in the past to figure out how they would go about taking human intelligence and making it into a machine. People thought maybe we should create rules, we should figure out how people think and there was a lot of research going on.

In the last five to seven yearsm few things have changed; one change that happened was that technology became more freely available. The second thing is people are using data a lot more. It is not important for the machine to figure out exactly how the human thinks but it should enough answers. Let us say if you looked at cats and dogs and you wanted to separate the dogs from the cats, one can go about saying that here are the rules about dogs and here are the rules about cats and that is pretty hard to do.

You need dimensions?

Anand Deshpande: Dimensions, maybe colour, furs, whatever else, and how do you identify a dog from a cat? It is very hard to do. But what the new techniques allows is you just train the machine to see hundreds of cats and hundreds of dogs. These are the neural network algorithms that are available now. They are able to say if these are cats, then the next time when you ask it, is this is a cat, it can tell you with 90% probability that this is a cat.

You know its freaky. When you upload a picture on Facebook, Facebook knows who that friend is and asks you whether you want to tag this one? It is kind of freaky.

Anand Deshpande: Yes, absolutely. What has happened in the last few years has changed this thing. There are two-three things. One, we are leveraging a lot of this artificial intelligence on the basis of past data. You are giving it sample results and saying okay, can you compare this with what you already have and that makes it very compelling and much more efficient.

Second, the compute power, cloud all these things have made it very possible.

And the third thing which is I think equally important is that all the major players have released their products in the market. Google is freely available and then there is Microsoft and IBMs Watson products. It is all accessible and that is changing the way we are looking at things right now. So, people are deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning into every single problem that you can get your hands on.

So data and algos -- a combination of both?

Anand Deshpande : Yes.

What do you think impacts normal life and business the most? There are four or five key technology trends that are emerging. What is the top most to your mind?

Anand Deshpande: Clearly machine learning and machine intelligence is going to have an impact because it is changing how we can do automation. It can change a whole bunch of things in terms of how we respond to things. Definitely it is the key to getting this going in some sense but a lot of other technologies where large amounts of data are getting collected, Internet of Things is useful for trying to respond to activities and people are looking for actionable insights. So personal robots have started to emerge, personal information systems are starting to happen. A lot of different kinds of things like this are merging into each other.

There is so much of talk about 3-D printing, cloud, artificial intelligence, Block Chain. Technology is becoming a part of our daily life and if I look at the numbers, not only for Indian IT companies but for global IT companies also, they are struggling. A handful of Silicon Valley software companies are doing well. The start-up is where all the excitement is. The money also seems to be drying up because everyone is worried about profitability. So, technology will change our lives but are these new technology innovations really making money for investors and shareholders?

Anand Deshpande: They are playing a role in every industry right now. If you look at what is happening in the auto industry or the self-driven cars and Uber and all of the systems that you talk about, that would not have been possible without technology and without AI and some of the other techniques that we talk about. The whole view of IT industry as we look at it as Nasscoms top 10 companies needs to change, IT is sort of becoming prolific in every single industry and everything is IT now. Everyone wants to become a software driven business.

Is IT making money for companies?

Anand Deshpande: Absolutely. Those who are not becoming software driven businesses are going out of business. So essentially you have no choice. Software is driving business today and if you are going to make money it is going to be because you have the software.

I am not debating that the world around us is changing and the world around us will change. That is the natural migration of technology. I remember when in my school we had that big fat dot matrix printer and we had a floppy where we would put DOS and now in my i-phone I carry 50 GB Cloud which is virtual. We use technology but barring 10-15 start-ups which are in Silicon Valley and coming up with all the innovations, inventions and all the upgrades in technology, I do not see too many profitable ventures. Why is that? Suddenly everybody is talking technology, everybody is investing in technology but numbers are not there. Profit is what I am looking at. I am not looking at top line growth because the cloud business will grow, your technology, artificial intelligence will grow, real experience will grow but if I am an investor, whether it is a PE or minority shareholder ultimately I want profits and dividends?

Anand Deshpande: You have to look at profits not just for IT companies. IT company profits will improve for sure but all manufacturing companies are going to survive and have profits because of technology right now. Technology has become a more fundamental. It is like breathing air right now and you cannot avoid it. So you cannot just say profits are not going to depend only on technology but technology is going to play a big role in the profits.

What is that big game changing technology right now and the impact that it is having on businesses by and large?

Kavi Arya: I would say sum it up with an acronym that everybody seems to enjoy. I call it CAST. C is for cloud; A for automation; S for sustainability and T is for tools.

Cloud: Increasingly what is happening is that people are moving their computing services from a dabba on their table to somewhere in the cloud because the communication infrastructure has become so good. Many big companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and so on are offering services where they are giving you this facility of storing your data and your enterprise data in the cloud but additionally they are also offering you data analytics and a service of actually being able to study your data to improve your competitiveness and I see more and more of this happening. In 2015, Alibabas revenue was almost one-fourth the GDP of India and now it sees itself not as an e-commerce company but as a company which is managing huge cloud, is doing data storage for you and is doing data analytics for you.

Automation: There will be more automation in whatever you do. All the low-end stuff is going to get done by automatic machines or robots, even software. A lot of the low end software work like testing and maintenance of large systems and things like that are going to get phased out and done by more and more intelligent software in the background.

Sustainability: It shows up in trends that you see nowadays like the Uberisation of the world where things that used to be a product in the past with a high maintenance and ownership cost, are being offered to you as a service. Cloud is also something that comes out of that. Instead of having a computer on your desk, you can hire as much space in cloud as you need. Instead of having a car parked in your garage, you can have as many taxies as you like. Sustainability is also smart. We are talking about smart cities, smart watches, smart consumables or what have you, everything is becoming smart. That is again a big consumer of a lot of IT infrastructure.

Tools: There are going to be more and more tools, high-end tools especially in software and so on which will make the lower end jobs more and more redundant and we will be having to move up skills ourselves in whatever we do. So that is if you like birds-eye view of what we see things as.

Everybody has heard about IoT. What is it doing to businesses?

Anand Deshpande: What is happening right now is that because of the technology abilities to put software into all kinds of devices and censors, today we can measure and activate censors all across the world. At the same time, you really can make significant business model changes because of that. One of the best examples is say for example Tesla. It has the ability to upgrade your car on the fly and as even after you bought the car you can upgrade it and you can get better features on your car.

If you look at washing machine that you buy once for the next 20 years. What would happen if you could upgrade your washing machine every so often because you have a better version of the product? We have been actually working on a lot of these areas and we find that the ability to bring data and respond in real time and change your business models to create the software driven business that you are looking at is really what IoT is making happen. This is real. Actually you will see impact of IoT in the next three years and it is going to be very significant and practically everything is going to have census and technology, data collecting, being collected in the cloud and response to it so definitely something to be watching out for all across.

The other one of course is blockchain and we hear that it is revolutionary?

Anand Deshpande: Blockchain started out to this concept around Bitcoins. The basic thing around blockchain is that it is a distributed transparent, tempered resistant auditable shared ledger that does not depend on a central agency. Let me explain what this means. What happens today is that if we had smart contracts, say a rental contract and we want to make sure that contract has not been tempered with by anybody. So we have a record. Let us say you have a contract that for your land or your parcel or whatever you have now and you want to make sure that contract that is in some central repository in the government. is not tempered with by anybody. You assume it has not been tempered with.

Like an e-locker.

Yes, but see all these lockers are all very central. When you have parties that do not trust each other, if I do not trust the government to be able to keep the data safe, then blockchain allows you to use the cloud in some sense, distributing copies of contracts all over the place to ensure that it cannot be tempered with. The copies are with everyone and so if you want a copy you can get a copy.

Like the Google doc?

Anand Deshpande: Well Google doc is still in one central place, Google doc is not replicated and if you were to edit Google doc and we had shared thing we would not know that it has not been changed. So with smart contracts especially when agencies are not partnering with each othe,r this becomes very handy. Another example, if we are transacting money, my bank will keep a ledger of all the activities. Your bank will keep its own ledgers. These ledgers are copied all over the place. What if we did not have to keep those copies and it was all available in one place so that you can just go to the central repository and look for that data and look for whatever you are looking for.

So this kind of a distributed architecture where you are able to copy these data sets and contracts all over the place and where you do not have to depend on one version of truth as it is distributed in the network is really what blockchain allows you to do. This came in from Bitcoins clearly but people have found good use for this across smart contracts and distributed things and especially when you are looking at international things when agencies do not necessarily want to talk to each other this becomes a very handy way. I expect this to be a bigger technology starting 2018. In 2017 there are certain issues around security and other things that will get sorted out.

So now we have understood these technologies the impact on various facets is what we want to discuss may be you have a question for Professor Arya.

Anand Deshpande: So let us ask Kavi who is a Professor at IIT in Mumbai, you are teaching all these technologies I am sure to your students how do students who are looking for jobs and technology situations right now, should be thinking about this in the future?

Kavi Arya: This is an age where students should be prepared to change their career at least five times in their life. We are talking about technology which has a life span of about two, three, five years and things like that things keep on changing. So they should be willing to continue learning all their life.

Second is that they should try and get the maximum degree or the highest level skill as they can before they leave the university ideally. It is interesting that an ACM survey the Association of Computing Machinery survey almost 20 years ago valued a B-Tech in the US at about $1 to $3 million over the life time of a person, it valued an M-Tech at between $2 to $3 million and it valued a PhD at $3 to $5 million. This is important both for companies and individuals nowadays because of the immense change that is happening in the world.

As India becomes a more developed economy and technology begins to take much more hold of the economy we will find this need much much more. There is a project which I am running at IIT Mumbai which is a Robotics Outreach Project called e-yantra where we are trying to reach out to a large number of students across colleges to actually equip them with these kind of skills that they need. We have discovered that you can really teach students through the medium of a competition pretty effectively and it is amazing how much talent there is out there in the country. Only a very small fraction of it comes to IIT Mumbai as we all know or the IIT system. I think there is a lot of talent out there which is not being used or capitalised upon which is what our project is trying to actually do.

Pari, what according to you would be the future five years hence of technology companies which are operating out of India?

Pari Natarajan: I will give you a few key trends based on the customer interaction we had. One, the level of automation is going to dramatically increase especially in some of the lower-end worker or managed services, infrastructure management, test automation. Customers are looking for a 15% reduction in overall cost of delivering some of these services, so that is one big trend.

Second, cloud becomes a key for how people manage their infrastructure. The number of people required to manage cloud infrastructure is reducing from 10 to 1 but when there is a major issue which happens in the cloud infrastructure, the skill of the person to solve this issue is going to be much higher. So you need a lot higher skilled person but not a lot of people. This is another big trend.

Third, large global enterprises are now moving from using lot of customised solutions to solutions which they can potentially configure, like moving into SaaS based cloud solutions. So when you move into a cloud solutions, you do not need a lot of system integration help. But that is how a lot of the Indian large IT services companies have built their business in integrating and customising Oracle, FAP and so on. That business is going to dramatically reduce as companies move into SaaS based solutions. These are some of the key trends which is going to have a disruption the traditional IT services business which our industry has built over the last 20 years.

Another thing the industry does not talk about quite is the talent issue. If you look at the talent pool which the industry hires from the industry over the last 10 years, the compensation has not really gone up for the IT industry. If you go to a university, most of the CEOs of large IT companies talk about how they do not need a lot of people to solve these issues going forward in IT. Now it creates a doubt in the students mind is this the right industry for me to get into because the salary has not increased and the CEOs talk about not needing a lot of people. Your picking order in universities is changing where university students could potentially prefer large Indian conglomerates and large Indian government institutions to join compared to the IT companies whereas IT companies were the key, the primary job creators.

So we have the technology trends are creating a disruption in the business model and also there is an issue they face around the talent which is coming in joining these companies.

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Cloud, automation, sustainability and tools are trends driving IT - Economic Times

While opinions vary on the number of jobs that can be automated away, its clear a large number of positions now handled by people, including accounting jobs, will be supplemented or replaced in some way by intelligent machines.

The utterance of the word automation conjures up gloomy images of job losses and people left behind by rapid technological change. While some job losses are inevitable, there is hope for optimism. Whats the reason? Simply put, the analytics at the root of those intelligent machines can provide expanded career paths for accountants and finance professionals.

Were already seeing a displacement of jobs in the accounting industry through outsourcing and robotic process automation, among other trends, yet the role of traditional accountants is expanding well beyond simple reporting measures.

Todays finance professionals must take into account a multitude of forces shaping financial performance: talent acquisition strategies, geopolitical forces, fluctuations in capital, emerging markets and intellectual property challenges, just to name a few. To suggest that smart and insightful accountants cannot acclimate to automation is to miss a fundamental truth about our nature: We are innovative, adaptable creatures who have been evolving and adapting to change for millions of years.

Beyond the Zero-Sum Game

Most enterprises and recruiters have struggled to redeploy jobs. A common mistake in thinking is: Once an accountant, always an accountant. So, what are some of the options?

At the end of 2016, Genpact Research Institute attempted to reframe the job loss mindset away from for every winner there must be a loser to how can we make the transition less painful for those affected? How can we better identify opportunities within the accounting profession to capitalize on the evolving role of the finance function?

Using data from 1,120 randomly selected people with accountant roles in their LinkedIn profiles and employed at large U.S.-based companies, we created a way to explore options for workers whose job has become obsolete or who require additional training.

The data analyzed career histories, education and skills to identify factors that enable people to move into roles traditionally unrelated to finance and accounting (F&A). The data showed that approximately one-third of accountants have held a role unrelated to F&A during their careers. The roles were in a much wider range than expected, and certainly broader than conventional recruiting firms would encourage candidates to consider (see chart below).

Diving deeper into specifics, it is clear that numerous career paths may exist for accountants. Customer service, operations, and sales and marketing were all well-represented in this research. In addition, possible positions in research, program management, consulting and business analysis stood out. Our research findings are clear: the skills and competencies that accountants possess are applicable to many fields, both in and out of finance. Risk-focused professions, where precision capabilities are central to supporting statistical and compliance methods, are just one example. We also found that the ability of accountants to work across the organization and understand other disciplines such as sales, marketing, supply chain and human resources may enable them to channel their skills into those areas.

The role of the finance function is expanding dramatically. Taking into account such factors as supply chains and market fluctuations, as well as how intellectual property and human capital shape business performance, further expands the boundaries of traditional accounting activities and broadens career opportunities.

Whats Next?

While the deployment of automated technologies will inevitably lead to some job losses, the evolving role of the finance function and skill sets accountants possess can lead to new, expanded and rewarding careers. The American Institute of CPAs and its management accounting designation, CGMA, reinforce the value that accountants bring to the table, with skill sets that can help address a wide array of business challenges.

Big Data can also help those at risk of losing their jobs identify new roles. With deeper study, corporate management and human resources professionals will be able to draw deeper conclusions on career progression, more effectively develop reskilling programs, and create new alternative jobs paths. Such learning and development initiatives may identify jobs for many positions in risk of being eliminated through automation.

For accountants, whose professional lives will be impacted by the rapid emergence of automation, it is certainly a time of increased anxiety. But for organizations that think creatively about the skills finance professionals bring to the table and how they can apply more broadly across the enterprise, this may be an opportunity to map a more hopeful and promising path to the future.

More here:

Voices Does automation mean job losses for accountants? - Accounting Today

Technology can aid rather then usurp public workers but for that to happen, public sector teams need solutions that give them autonomy and control

Public sector morale over job security is at an all-time low. More than a million jobs have been cut over the past six years in line with the governments austerity drive, with plans to axe still more from local authorities.

Added to this is concern that automation will see yet more public workers lose their jobs. Amelia, the AI employee deployed by Enfield Borough Council in the autumn of last year, is hailed as being 60% less expensive than her human counterpart, making AI an attractive option. But is the threat of robot replacements a real one?

According to recent research by Oxford University and Deloitte, 850,000 public sector jobs could be automated by 2030. It states that administrative roles are most at risk, while those interacting with the public are less so.

But theres a clear inference in the report that automation doesnt equate to unemployment. The authors suggest that automation has the potential to complement existing jobs by automating repetitive processes or even create new better-paid jobs.

>See also: Do you think a robot could replace your job?

Make no mistake, automation is already with us. The digitalisation of public sector services has already seen many of the processes previously carried out by human hand now scheduled by software.

Far from being met with resistance, this digitalisation has had an emancipating effect, freeing up staff from the daily grind to focus on other issues and the reduction in red tape has generated efficiency gains.

Alongside this, theres another story thats hitting the headlines when it comes to public sector employment: the woeful lack of digital skills. This drove the DWP to rollout digital academies in a bid to upskill staff, with 3,000 civil servants undergoing courses over the last two years.

As of September, those academies came under the remit of the GDS, which has pledged to double the number being trained annually. But the future of the academies now seems uncertain. Some sources even saying a lack of funding is the reason behind the current stonewalling over the Government Transformation Strategy.

So if we cant upskill public sector staff at the rate needed, could we outsource technical expertise? Finding (and keeping) skilled developers can be a challenge and the cost of employing the right people can be high. This is because digital skills are in short supply across the board.

According to the Digital Skills Crisis report published in June, the private sector is also struggling with 93% of tech companies reporting that the skills gap is affecting their business. Clearly theres a technical deficit as well as a fiscal one and to overcome that we will need automation.

Far from being made redundant by robots, technology could continue to empower staff, provided that solutions are built to cater for rather than replace human operators. Investing in this type of enhanced automation makes sense, not least because teams increasingly comprise a range of technical abilities. Technical competencies vary on digital design projects, for instance, and often include user experience designers, business analysts and developers.

Imagine, then, if that team could be united through the use of a technically agnostic solution. Even during the digital design process, theres no need, for instance, for staff to be proficient in code.

What they do need is the vision to design a service that fulfils user needs and thats easier to accomplish if you dont have to hand over your design to a third party, introducing delay, cost and inconvenience.

If solutions are intuitive to use they can empower these non-technical team members to be actively involved in digital service design and management.

Low-code services offer this level of control and flexibility with user-friendly dashboards and GUIs that feature drag-and-drop tools, the ability to reuse interfaces or integrate with third-party extensions and plug-in APIs.

The team doesnt need to be upskilled or supplanted by an expensive third-party contractor conversant in code. They simply need to have access to some initial support and self-help tutorials to quickly get up to speed to create, design and update digital interactive services independently.

The resulting digital services do themselves automate previously time-consuming laborious processes. For example, when it comes to case management, an automated digital solution can provide the applicant and case worker with access to documentation, monitor the progress of the application, and avoid problems such as duplication, incomplete or fraudulent claims.

>See also: Make way for the automated workforce

This type of case management is transforming how government departments work, from solicitors and plaintiffs associated with Legal Aid claims, to those seeking grants from public bodies such as Heritage Lottery Fund and the Creative and Cultural Skills agency, to charities seeking to file financial audit reports via the Charity Commission.

In the future, automation could free workers from other bureaucratic tasks. The police force, social workers and NHS staff all stand to benefit from a joined up system whereby records can be accessed across different government departments.

Automation can break down barriers by enabling staff to collaborate across different departments and across geographical areas. And it can level the playing field between highly technically skilled and the non-technical professionals.

Technology can, and should, aid rather then usurp public workers but for that to happen, public sector teams need solutions that give them autonomy and control.

Sourced from Jane Roberts, strategy director, Toplevel

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Automation and austerity: will robots make you redundant? - Information Age

Atera, which makes a joint RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management) and PSA (Professional Services Automation) platform with a single code base, has announced a new release with a broad range of enhancements. Chief among them are the addition of auto-healing scripts, and enhanced out-of-the-box monitoring, both of which reduce the amount of work an MSP has to do.

One significant addition is the addition of Auto Healing Scripts, which trigger a script to run when a threshold level is exceeded.

This is a very key thing, because it allows the MSP to build a set of automated actions and reactions, said Gil Pekelman, Ateras CEO. And its all automated, so they dont have to do it again in the future. Anything that is automated in autohealing is work the MSP wont have to do.

It extends the monitoring path once a threshold is reached so you can react automatically with a script, said Oshri Moyal, VP of Research and Development at Atera. If you are close to running out of disk space, for example, you will automatically clean the disk.

Enhanced out-of-the-box monitoring has also been added, which include allowing MSPs to select multiple events in one threshold item.

In feedback, this was high on the list of missing features, Moyal said.

Users have said we want a lot more monitored out of the box, Pekelman said, But how much do you monitor, thats the issue. If you monitor too much, you get lots of false positives and you run around chasing them, and if you monitor too little, you dont get alerts when you need them. A few things are absolutely essential, but beyond that, its tough to determine what gives you the biggest bang for your buck. We have effectively engaged in Crowdsourcing to get feedback, and have given what the crowd has told us they wanted. We added new capabilities out of the box so there is less work to do. Combined with autohealing, where things will be automatically fixed for you, you become more efficient.

The Splashtop remote app has now been fully integrated into the Atera system.

We started with a tool for remote management that we developed ourselves, but we decided to focus on our core competency and we released the integration with Splashtop in September, Pekelman said. Then, you still had to go through Splashtop and get a Splashtop account. Now, when you sign up with Atera you are fully connected. You dont have to set up another account or deal with a third party.

The agent installation process has been streamlined through newly integrated troubleshooting diagnostics, improving the speed and ease of installing agents.

Oshri Moyal, Ateras VP of Research and Development

What we have done here is taken how we handled support cases, and turned it into a piece of software, Moyal said. Our diagnostic tool checks connectivity and in one click finds potential issues when an MSP installs an agent that can the MSP how to fix the problem.

Atera doesnt charge per agent, and so this troubleshooting capability is especially valuable here. Pekelman stated. We dont believe in support, not in this day and age. You dont call Google and Facebook for support. We have a very dedicated support team, but we dont want you to have to call them.

Other improvements beyond the automation ones include the addition of Integrated Wake-on-LAN (WoL) capabilities, which Moyal said was among their most requested enhancements, and which lets a computer to be turned on or awakened directly from the Atera console.

This is a very cool feature, Pekelman said. If a server is down and off and you need to access it, you dont have to drive over to do that. You just click a button, and it wakes up.

User activity status updates now allow MSPs to see if an account is active, disconnected, idle, or locked before they remotely connect to the workstation.

MSPs say when they connect remotely to a machine, they want to know if user is on the machine or not, so that they will only connect if its idle or disconnected, Moyal stated.

Atera stresses its uniqueness in having the same code for its RMM and PSA capabilities, and Pekelman indicated improvements have been made on the PSA side as well.

We now have automatic email alerts on contracts that are about to expire, and more detailed invoices based on contract type, ticket, and time entry, he said.

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Atera adds multi-faceted automation capabilities in new release of joint RMM-PSA platform - ChannelBuzz.ca