Kaseya has recently launched a range of new offerings to help managed service providers to grow their business – and it backs Greg Jones’ assertion that this is a great time to be an MSP.
It has been a busy time for Greg Jones. The VP of business development, EMEA at Kaseya was in Las Vegas recently for the Kaseya Connect Global event, which had more than 5,000 attendees, including managed service providers (MSPs) and vendors.
There, the company announced its new flagship offer to the market, Kaseya 365. “That has been 10 years in the making,” says Greg. “It is about revolutionising the MSP landscape for our partner base. Here at Kaseya and Datto, we’re all about the MSP community, not just driving enterprise-grade technology down to support MSPs and SMBs but helping them with their business operational maturity and to grow.
“Kaseya365 is everything that an MSP would need to manage their business and that of their customers, including back up and automating aspects of endpoint management. There are Express and Pro versions, but both are available for a lower cost than anything else in the market.”
Greg adds that Kaseya 365 has been introduced to help partners become more productive and profitable across their existing customer base and help them secure and win new business. “In our most recent reports, we see attracting and winning new customers at the top of the list of what keeps MSPs up at night,” he says. “Kaseya 365 can help them within their business, but also to price competitively in the marketplace to win new business.”
In the weeks since Kaseya Connect Global, the numbers of existing and new partners taking up Kaseya 365 has been “off the scale”, according to Greg. “That is amazing for us.”
Industry up
This caps what was already a busy 12 months for Kaseya, with numbers up across the business in the UK, according to Greg. “This means SMBs are spending well, meaning the MSP landscape is brilliant now,” he says. “In certain geographical regions, there’s an economic pullback, but we’re not seeing it in the technology sector – we’re seeing businesses lean into technology more than ever.
“When we look back at previous pullbacks, going back to 2008 and earlier, we’ve seen technology spend take a hit, but we’re not seeing that this time. A lot of data shows that COVID changed how business has operated and now they see the value of technology and how it can be used to drive the business forward. That’s been very positive for us.”
Partners first
Kaseya has introduced other initiatives recently too, including its Partner First Pledge. “This is a monumental step forward for Kaseya,” says Greg. “It shows that our MSP partners, irrelevant of their size or scale, are our number one priority. Kaseya wouldn’t be the size it is today without every one of those partners.”
The Partner First Pledge means that everything that Kaseya does is geared to helping its partners in the MSP community. “I’m questioned constantly by the likes of our CEO, Fred Voccola, about the things we do and how they are impacting our partners and how it is helping our partners,” says Greg.
“We’ve put some bold stakes in the ground around this pledge. For instance, the market said they wanted one-year contracts to be more competitive and we brought that to market to break down the barriers for MSPs to be able to do business. We’ve reintroduced month-to-month contracts as well for Datto BCDR products, which is, again, enabling our partners to have more flexibility in how they conduct business with their customers. Again, this desire came up from partners and we’ve listened to them and acted on it.
“We’ve also introduced catastrophic loss prevention into our Partner First Pledge. That means that if any MSP that does business with Kaseya or Datto loses a customer that represents 20% or more of their revenue, we will forego those contracts with the MSP, we’ll cancel them down or move the spend, whatever is required.
“We don’t just look at it from a lens of ‘does it make sense for Kaseya?’ Everything we’re doing now is ‘does this look right from the lens of the MSP? Is this helping them grow?’ Because if we’re saying we’re truly MSP-centric, everything that we do from a business perspective needs to represent that. If they grow, there’s a direct correlation with our success as well.”
Flexible friends
As part of the pledge, Kaseya has also introduced Flex Spend. “Flex Spend is across all our products,” says Greg. “It allows partners to reallocate their spend within our backup suites to all the solutions. Again, this was a concern voiced by MSPs. We offer many different backup solutions, some on premise, some in the cloud.
“For instance, many SMBs are changing their networks. Some are on premise, some are hybrid – a combination of the cloud and on premise – and some are solely in the cloud. The problem for many MSPs was they couldn’t pitch and sell solutions on one-, three- or five-year contracts because they didn’t know where the estate was going to be in three months, let alone a year. So we decided to be flexible around the spend. For example, if they sign a contract for a year or three years or whatever, we will allow them to move that spend to either a cloud or physical solution and switch between the two.”
Finally, there is a price lock guarantee. “For any business that signs a contract with Kaseya or Datto, we guarantee that we will never increase the rates during that period beyond 5%,” he says. “That is based upon inflation and costs. But you’re not going to see any huge price spikes from us like you do with some other vendors in the market. We see up to a 26% increase in some cases from the start of a contract to the end and one-off spikes of 15% occur quite regularly in the marketplace.
“That guarantee is a huge stake in the ground for us. That’s part of the evolution of Datto and Kaseya coming together. When we made the acquisition, Fred Voccola said to staff and external partners that the deal was not about chopping companies up, it was about taking the best of Kaseya and Datto and putting them together and making it the best organisation out there for the whole MSP and SMB community.”
Greg adds that there have been plenty of other changes within the business. “For instance, we’ve revamped our global partner programme for 2024 and 2025,” he says. “We have reversed engineered it based on what MSPs want. We’ve took the most recent reports that Kaseya and Datto do on the state of the industry and looked at the top challenges, what their concerns are and what they are struggling with and then built the partner programme based on what they need to win new business.”
AI impact
One particular area of concern and interest for MSPs is artificial intelligence (AI), and Kaseya has been keen to that. “We’re seeing a lot of SMBs going to MSPs to ask for help and support around AI, machine learning and automation,” says Greg.
“Many businesses are realising that they can save huge amounts of money by automating a lot of arguably laborious or mundane day-to-day processes using AI and machine learning.
“Likewise, MSPs are looking to automate as much as possible because technical staff – about 80% of employees within an MSP are technical – are expensive resources, they’re hard to get hold of and to retain. It helps make the MSP more profitable and productive, but it also helps them retain their good tech talent because it takes out all the boring and laborious tasks so that they can work on more exciting projects or training and development. In our business too, it’s critical. A big focus for our research and development team is all around automation, AI, machine learning and driving more integrations.
“All our products at Kaseya are integrated with each other because we own the technology, so we can truly integrate an application at all levels, meaning products fully talk to and understand each other. Whereas lots of vendors talk about integration, it’s often at a superficial level because they don’t own the technology.
“We’ve made leaps forward around AI and machine learning. One of our biggest achievements is Cooper, our AI platform that sits in IT Complete. One of the things Cooper can do is look at the technology an MSP takes from us and make recommendations based upon our partner base and how they’re using the technology and the tools.
“For us, AI and machine learning is huge because for a lot of SMBs now the biggest wins they’re getting is not necessarily just from selling technology to customers, it’s about improving their business processes and automating a lot of that.”
Compliance as a service
But the sector never sleeps and there is constant innovation. One of the trends that will take prominence in the coming months is uptake of compliance as a service, Greg says – and is something Kaseya will be able to help MSPs with.
“We’re seeing a lot of data from the likes of Canales, IDC and Gartner predicting about £75 billion being spent by 2028 on compliance as a service,” he says.
“Cybersecurity and cyber resilience are still huge areas for growth as MSPs and SMBs are spending more money than ever on it. But now we’re seeing lots of regulation and compliance coming into the market. A lot of these trends filter down from enterprise organisations down to SMBs and MSPs. But we’re also seeing the NIST framework and other cybersecurity frameworks now, including compliance, security and insurance. I predict that there will be a lot more requests from SMBs for help and support with that because it’s no longer a tick-box exercise, you must do those things in practice or insurance companies won’t pay out if there is an incident.”
Good tailwinds
These innovations and trends are indicative of the strength of the market currently and Greg is bullish about the future for MSPs and Kaseya. “It’s a buoyant market, we’ve got very good tailwinds currently,” he says. “We’re seeing a slowdown of some larger scale project-based work at the enterprise level, but it’s in line with where the economy is now.
“It’s a very strong market. It’s a good time to be an MSP and we’re seeing more come into the market. We’re also seeing an increase in mergers and acquisitions, which is good because that tells us it’s a good industry to be in. There is also a lot of PE and VC money coming in, as well as big enterprise companies coming in to try and take a slice of the pie.”
But Greg acknowledges that there are areas with challenges and Kaseya is there to provide support to those MSPs that need it. “We understand that some of our partners need support in some areas as not everybody is booming,” he says. “A lot of that comes back to sales and marketing and how they go to market in certain verticals, which we can help with.
“But overall, it’s a very strong market, we’ve got strong outlooks for Kaseya and the market in general, so we are looking to the future with confidence.”
