Cisco Umbrella

Enterprise network security

Spotlight

OpenDNS Open Sources Autotask Web Service API Client

By Eric Reynolds

Here at OpenDNS, we have a variety of customers–from Fortune 500 companies to parents who are looking to protect their children from unsavory websites.
A special and important part of our customer base, Managed Service Providers (MSPs), provide proactive IT services to small and medium businesses (SMBs). MSPs provide a full suite of IT services from data backup and security, to being a company’s virtual CIO. Unlike traditional hourly contractors, MSPs offer an all-inclusive subscription service without extra costs for repairs.
Enter OpenDNS Umbrella’s cloud delivered security model. A MSP can leverage Umbrella’s predictive security to prevent customer infections and drastically reduce the need for manual malware cleanups. This makes for happier customers and decreases their cost per customer. A perfect fit.
MSPs use Professional Services Automation tools, or PSAs, to manage their customers, keep track of billing, and monitor service requests (among other things).
These partners are very important to us, and we have a dedicated engineering team to implement new features to help improve their bottom line. In November 2013, we announced our integration with ConnectWise, one of the major PSAs. We are proud to now provide an integration with Autotask, the other popular PSA. The Autotask integration is currently in limited availability, and will be released soon.
While designing our integration with Autotask, we found that many MSPs use PHP to write both simple scripts and complex applications. The Autotask documentation is very verbose and well written, but the examples (written in VB.NET) do not work as expected using SOAPClient in PHP.
Today we are open sourcing our Autotask Web Service API client. It can be found in the OpenDNS GitHub repository, and has been registered on Packagist for installation via Composer.
Our goal is to help MSPs, and any other company integrating with Autotask, to get up and running quickly. If you find any bugs, or wish to make improvements, please file an issue, or fork our repository and open a pull request.