To understand where enterprise IT may end up, sometimes one must look at providers operating outside the enterprise market. Kaseya represents one such IT provider than can help all size organizations understand the future of IT. While Kaseya focuses on delivering IT products and services to managed service providers (MSPs), it has a more comprehensive strategy. At its DattoCon 2024 conference, Kaseya continued to deliver on its strategy that has ramifications beyond the MSPs it serves.
Kaseya’s Strategy: The First (and Only!) Choice of MSPs
Kaseya currently possesses one clear cut strategy. It wants to become more than the primary choice of MSPs for IT products and services. It wants to be their first and only choice.
To achieve this strategy, Kaseya has defined three high-level objectives that inform its decisions and actions. These include:
- Provide all the core IT products and services that MSPs need.
- Integrate the IT products it acquires so that MSPs may manage them through one central console.
- Help make MSPs profitable through their use of Kaseya’s IT products and services.
One can see how Kaseya follows these objectives by the decisions that it has made in the past few years.
Kaseya’s 6+ Year Acquisition Binge
The first objective has prompted Kaseya to acquire at least ten companies that offer the core IT products and services that MSPs need. A partial list of companies that Kaseya has acquired over the past 6+ years includes:
- audIT (2023)
- Datto (2022)
- Graphus (2020)
- IT Glue (2018)
- RapidFire Tools (2018)
- RocketCyber (2021)
- SaaS Alerts (2024)
- Spanning Cloud Apps (2018)
- Unitrends (2018)
- Vonahi Security (2023)
However, acquiring these IT products and services that MSPs need only represent a third of Kaseya’s vision. MSPs want to do more than buy IT products and services. MSPs also want to easily and properly deploy them and then manage them from a single console.
Simplified Deployment and Management
To encourage MSPs to choose Kaseya’s IT products and services, Kaseya has two approaches. First, it continues to combine its various offerings into packages more easily consumable and sellable by MSPs.
This was evidenced by its promotion of Kaseya 365 Endpoint and Kaseya 365 User throughout DattoCon. These represent Kaseya’s effort to package the companies and products it has acquired into two solutions that MSPs can deliver.
Kaseya 365 Endpoint comes in two versions: 365 Express and 365 Pro. 365 Express includes Anti-virus, EndPoint Backup, Endpoint Detection and Response, Patch Management, Ransomware Detection, and Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM). 365 Pro includes all of Express’s features plus Managed Detection and Response.
The Kaseya 365 User package tackles the MSP’s client security-specific requirements. 365 User includes anti-phishing, dark web monitoring, security awareness training, and simulation and testing.
As Kaseya packages these acquired products together, it has also sought to make them all more easily manageable. Early on, Kaseya created a dashboard where all its acquired products appeared. MSPs would then click on specific products as needed to then manage them.
More recently, Kaseya has made strides to integrate the management of its products. In this way, MSPs may manage them through one console rather than opening a new management console for each product.
Finally, talking to Kaseya’s product management team, it would prefer that MSPs not manage Kaseya’s products as all. Rather, it would prefer MSPs properly and successfully deploy their products out of the gate. In this way, issues rarely if ever emerge that need resolution.
To achieve this end, Kaseya plans to hire 100 solution architects by the end of 2024 to assist MSPs in deploying Kaseya’s solutions. Kaseya hopes by MSPs properly configuring and deploying its solutions that they will then spend less time troubleshooting issues later.
Show Me the Money
One attribute perhaps sets MSPs apart from those normally employed in IT working for most organizations. MSPs seek to make money in the IT services that they provide. Specifically, they want to make a profit.
Kaseya undertakes a couple of initiatives to help MSPs achieve this end. First, as Kaseya acquires new companies and products and adds them to its product portfolio, Kaseya lowers the product’s price. Kaseya generally seeks to lower the price it charges the MSP by about 20 percent. How well it achieves this objective for each product, I could not quantify while attending DattoCon. However, that objective should sit well with most MSPs.
Second, by better integrating its products and supporting MSPs in deploying their products, Kaseya helps minimize an MSP staffing requirements. These steps should also help MSP better control costs and increase their profit margins above the ten percent industry average.
Kaseya’s Strategy Foretells the Future of Enterprise IT
As one who started as an IT system administrator before becoming a storage engineer and analyst, Kaseya’s strategy makes sense. I stopped working in IT, in part, because I got burnt out. Being on call and working all the time was not viable for me long-term. Further, I know many of my colleagues have had similar experiences and made similar decisions to leave IT.
Kaseya has admittedly not yet fully executed on its strategy. However, to its credit, it is moving the ball forward. It has acquired many if not all the technologies that companies need to manage and secure their data and infrastructure. It has started integrating these technologies together to make them reasonably manageable. Kaseya wants to help MSPs correctly deploy its solutions, so they do not then spend all their time managing them.
In my mind, Kaseya seeks to deliver what every IT provider should be delivering. I realize that there are aspects of IT that will never be easy. However, protecting and recovering applications and data on standard PCs and servers should not fall under that umbrella.
For this reason, Kaseya’s strategy foretells the future of enterprise IT. If MSPs can support their clients who may literally reside anywhere, enterprise IT shops will want this same functionality.
Granted, some, perhaps even many enterprise IT shops may already have similar functionality. However, Kaseya’s ability to equip MSPs to deliver these services and do so profitably provides insight into how enterprise IT may well evolve. Delivering these services may well become a well-oiled machine that may become a profit center for some ambitious enterprises.
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