Kaseya is growing globally, but it still focused on local connections. Likewise, it is focused on its core business but is constantly innovating – including with AI solutions – to provide MSPs with the tools to bring results to customers.
On a sunny March day, Birmingham was the destination for latest of Kaseya’s Connect Local events, which took place in various locations around Europe during February and March.
Two hundred people were in attendance for the day of presentations, learning and networking and, importantly, giving Kaseya the opportunity to engage directly with its partners and get feedback from them and share updates.
For Dermot McCann, who took over as head of Kaseya’s EMEA business in June last year, as well as overseeing the APJ operation, these events are vital for the company to foster local connections.
“I understand, particularly in regional markets, the implications of working with a large global vendor, how important it is to have nuances in your relationships and interactions with your partners,” he says. “For example, we were recently in Munich and engaged directly with German-speaking account managers and technical specialists. We try to visit as many places throughout the course of each quarter as possible.”
As Dermot notes, Kaseya has grown up in the MSP business space. “Our solutions deliver IT management and security services to MSPs that are small businesses, which are in turn delivering IT management and security services to other small businesses, their end customers.”
Partner First Pledge
A key part of this commitment to engagement is Kaseya’s Partner First Pledge, which was launched last year. “That’s off the back of listening to and engaging with our partners and responding to feedback and also building programmes and policies that were common practise within the company at the executive level,” says Dermot. “As we’ve scaled, it was important that they become partner-first programmes. Things like clearly defining the lengths of the agreements we can put in place and making sure every partner understands the flexibility we have in our contracts.”
Another one of Kaseya’s key products launched last year was Kaseya 365, which also has flexibility at its core. “When we launched Kaseya 365 one of the most critical elements of that was the price guarantee,” says Dermot. “Just to reinforce our commitment to the channel and our partners and show that we are committed to their success. We only win when they win. We are contractually prohibited from increasing our prices beyond the amount that has been set in the price of our guarantee. This gives partners certainty and not many vendors provide that level of certainty.
“It also gives them certainty then when they’re thinking about their own businesses and how they choose their partners and pricing strategies as they look to grow their businesses.
“It’s about shared risk. We understand in that in our partners’ businesses, circumstances change significantly, so it’s not in our interest to hold partners to commitments that they can’t honour. We work proactively with our partners to listen to them and respond and adjust their licencing commitments accordingly.”
TruPeer
Another launch from 2024 again ties into this ethos of helping MSPs. TruPeer is a peer networking group that leverages best practice from MSPs across the world. “A lot of our partners really embraced it,” says Dermot. “We’ve got multiple chapters now set up across Europe. Essentially, this is an accountability framework for our partners to look at growing their businesses. It’s the ability for our partners and us to connect in a meaningful way and share insights from 50,000 plus partners that we engage with around the world.
“It’s not something we’re trying to sell to people. We are trying to help coach, mentor, and grow our partners to profitability. We will be hosting our next TruPeer EMEA meeting over three days in London, starting with a pre-day event on 6 May, followed by two days of business updates, breakout sessions, and roundtable discussions on sales and accountability on 7-8 May. Gary Pica, founder of TruMethods, a Kaseya company, will also be attending, as he owns our enablement programs globally and plays a key role in driving initiatives to support partners in EMEA.”
Kaseya 365
As Dermot mentioned, another big launch in 2024 was Kaseya 365 Endpoint, which has been hugely successful for the company. “With Kaseya 365, we looked at the industry and the consumption of technology,” he explains. “On average, there might be seven or eight different tools that a partner uses to deliver services at the endpoint. Antivirus, maybe a managed software, software management and RMM and backup, for instance. All those technologies, on average, is maybe £3 per endpoint. If you have eight of those, it’s £24 worth of technology. That’s a significant inhibitor to growth. When we launched Kaseya 365 Endpoint and put it out there at £3, straightaway, we altered the unit economics of the industry by having all that best-to-breed technology delivered via single subscription at a fraction of the cost.
“Our partners who’ve embraced it without changing anything else in their business have dramatically increased their profitability, and improved the level of security and services that they can deliver to their end customers.
“This means that their SMB customers, which are over 50% of the target of the cyber criminals because they’re so vulnerable as they’re often so underinvested in security, can now be more secure, which is better for the industry. It also gives our partners more comfort that the customers that they’re delivering services to have a level of protection, even if that customer wasn’t prepared to pay what they would consider a premium for that service.”
Pushing on
With the success of Kaseya 365, Dermot is looking to push Kaseya on. “You launch a platform like that, you really hope that people embrace it, and the industry has. We would have been happy with a few thousand partners signing up in the first 12 months. We crossed that threshold in the first few weeks.
“In 2024 we delivered some amazing solutions to market, such as Kaseya 365. All those solutions have been designed to push the platform strategy back into the partner base, put money back in our customers’ businesses, and help them grow and scale their businesses.
“For the rest of this year, we have more announcements to come. We’ve also been improving and investing heavily in the back office of our business. We have a lot of legacy tech debt so there will be major digital transformation and initiatives are underway already within Kaseya.
“We’re also working with numerous consultants, as well as bolstering our executive leadership and operational teams. We need to be the best end-to-end provider of technology in this space at the right price point and that is our goal.”
Advancing AI
With Kaseya looking to provide solutions for now and the future, artificial intelligence (AI) is forming a crucial part of the company’s strategy and its offering to customers.
As Nadir Merchant, general manager, IT Operations Suite at Kaseya, explains. “We are still in the early stages of seeing what AI can do for businesses,” he says. “It does have practical uses, but there’s a long way to go. I think of AI today as being akin to the internet in the early ’90s. Back then, we had Web 1.0, we had email. Being able to communicate with people around the world seamlessly was unparalleled, and it allowed us to do things that we weren’t capable of before.
“But if you look at where we are 15, 20 years later with high-speed internet everywhere and devices in our pockets, what we had in the 90’s pales in comparison. I think we’re going to see the same thing with AI over the next five to 10 years. It’s going to take longer than some people expect, but over time, we’ll get to a place where it’s going to look like what we have today with AI is not even the start.”
But for AI to have the impact customers desire, then it must provide value, Nadir warns. “Some organisations have rushed to put AI into their technology because it’s a big buzz topic and generates a lot of eyeballs and we all want to get attention and generate leads for our businesses so we can sell our software,” he says.
“But Kaseya’s job as software vendors is to provide value to the organisations that are consuming it. To do that, we need to focus on the outcomes they’re getting. What is the use case? What are people going to do with our technology? Because if we build cool, shiny things that do cool, unique things, but they don’t have a real purpose, then we haven’t done anything useful. Our focus is on building what we’re calling practical AI; capabilities that provide a real meaningful purpose for a consumer so they can get meaningful benefit from it.”
Cooper AI
Kaseya’s AI solution is Cooper AI. It is focused on delivering automation to business processes, which can help to eliminate tedious or repetitive tasks, enabling employees to engage in other higher-value tasks, helping to bring productivity gains. It can also help to improve security practices. Cooper AI leverages actionable insights, automation and smart assistance to utilise platform features and boost efficiency.
“We’re also building capabilities that are specific for use cases to help drive those outcomes,” says Nadir. “I try not to think about how can we use AI, but about what are the capabilities that we want to deliver? And then within those capabilities, how can we leverage AI to deliver those more effectively, or can we use AI to deliver things that we wouldn’t be able to deliver otherwise? It’s almost inverse. We think about the use case and the outcome that we want to deliver before the technology we want to implement.”
Understanding AI
For MSPs going out to customers, especially SMBs, they need to understand certain things when implementing AI solutions. “They should be thinking about it in the same way we are – what are the outcomes the customer wants,” says Nadir.
“Anytime we’re evaluating a solution, the first questions should be ‘what does it actually do for me? How is it going to help my business? How is it going to help my team? Is it going to make me more efficient? What are the key drivers that it’s going to achieve for us? And then how is it going to get there?’ Those are the things that need to be understood to figure out if the technology is useful.
“Then there’s vetting the solution to make sure it’s something that we want to bring into organisation. Does it meet privacy and security standards? Is it going to cause any unnecessary harm or any negative consequences? Those are the different angles that need to be considered.
“Every new technology we implement creates potential for vulnerability or risk. We need to understand those risks, figure out what you can and can’t mitigate, how much you’re willing to accept and then move forward.”
But Nadir emphasises that MSPs need to get on board now with AI technology and get to grips with understanding it, so they can then advise their customers with authority. “That’s where Kaseya can come in because they can provide expertise to their MSPs.”
Future
Nadir believes there will be incremental progress in AI in the next year. “Things like content generation AI is proving to be very good and we’ll see that continue to proliferate. Even though that’s well adopted and proven it’s not ubiquitous but it’s going to head down that path and will be in about three years.
“Then on the IT side I think we’ll see continued growth, but slow and steady on using AI to drive IT operations. There are organisations that are at the leading edge that are early adopters of this technology but there’s a lot that are still evaluating whether it’s right for them. We’ll continue to see those organisations slowly adopt AI and use some of these technologies.”
Kaseya will continue to be at that forefront, developing new opportunities for MSPs going forward. “We have a very aggressive AI roadmap,” says Nadir. “We have a dedicated team working on our core AI technologies. Then we’ve got every single one of our module teams working on how they embrace the core capabilities that we’ve delivered and create new Cooper AI capabilities inside their modules to help our users to be more effective.”
