Kaseya Turnaround: An MSP Reality Check
Kaseya, the MSP software provider, described multiple business milestones today. The company, which underwent a business reset of sorts this year, points to a “strong finish to 2015” while promising continued milestones in 2016. But just how far has Kaseya come in the past year?
CEO Fred Voccola
First, a little background. Insight Venture Partners acquired Kaseya in 2013 and rolled a range of additional acquisitions into the business. History shows the moves were too much, too soon for the company to manage. Kaseya faced fierce competition and apparently suffered from too many priorities (for instance, MSPs vs. midmarket customers) and too many technology digestions in recent years. A reset occurred in 2015 when Fred Voccola arrived as CEO.
In recent months, Voccola and the Kaseya management team have met with hundreds of MSPs — gathering feedback and setting up a Customer Success Program to strengthen relations with service providers. In a November 2015 interview with ChannelE2E, Voccola shared many of the milestones as part of an overall progress report on the company.
Fast forward to present day and Kaseya says the milestones continue. Overall, ChannelE2E believes the company is making progress with MSPs. But challenges remain. Here’s a quick update.
1. Kaseya Customer Engagement
In August, Kaseya rolled out a “comprehensive, global-wide Customer Success Program designed to enable customers to derive maximum value from their relationship with Kaseya and to help them drive maximum revenue growth and profitability from their Kaseya product investments. The program included an initial investment by Kaseya of over $6 million and has received an overwhelmingly positive response.” Moreover, the executive team has met with more than 300 customers while also relaunching and rebranding a customer advisory group — now known as Kaseya’s Customer Success Council.
ChannelE2E Spin: Kaseya’s smartest step was clarifying who the customer is. Instead of chasing mid-market IT managers, the company has doubled down on MSPs serving small and midsize businesses. The challenge? That market is now saturated with rivals — many of whom have had consistent MSP messaging for nearly a decade…
2. Kaseya Product Innovation
Kaseya points to multiple innovations, including the launch of Kaseya VSA 9.2 with Windows 10 support. The enhancements, Kaseya asserts, were based on MSP feedback. Also of note, more than 600 MSPs now leverage Kaseya AuthAnvil (identity and access management); while the company has continued to enhance Kaseya 365 Command (Office 365 management) and Traverse (SLA management).
ChannelE2E Spin: We’ll poke around a bit to gather feedback about Kaseya VSA 9.2 (give us some time on that). Overall, it’s good to see a diverse product portfolio — but many of the Kaseya offerings now face heavy competition. For instance…
- Kaseya 365 Command: Kaseya acquired that technology in 2013 — though multiple companies now offer Office 365 management tools to MSPs. Examples include LogicNow and ConnectWise’s CloudConsole. Overall, the MSP software market has to move far more rapidly toward Azure and Amazon Web Services management.
- Kaseya AuthAnvil: Kaseya acquired this technology in August 2014, as part of the Scorpion Software buyout. No doubt, two-factor authentication, single sign on and password management are hot niches for MSPs. But here again, nimble rivals have emerged. Chief among them: PassPortal.
3. Kaseya Growth
Kaseya says its MSPs now manage more than 10 million endpoints, and the company added more than 1,000 new customers in 2015. New or expanded offices have taken root in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, London, and Dublin. Annual R&D is now more than $25 million.
ChannelE2E Spin: It’s difficult to quantify that “1,000 new customers” claim — especially since some customers could be tiny MSPs leveraging a one-off product (say, 365 Command) for a handful of customer seats. Still, the overall message from Kaseya (i.e., “We’re growing”) is a positive one.
Bottom Line
Overall, it seems clear that Kaseya — as a company — is in better shape this year than it was in 2014. Perhaps more importantly, Kaseya is back in listen-mode — meeting with MSPs and gathering their feedback and guidance.
Still, there’s additional room for improvement. ChannelE2E has heard from a handful of MSPs that abandoned Kaseya this year, concluding that the company’s pricing was either too high or turnover on the sales team has been too dramatic. Some MSPs even received annual lump-sum bills — a serious “No, No” in the age of pay-as-you-go managed and cloud services.
Stay tuned for more updates. ChannelE2E hopes to speak with Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola in the days ahead for his views on the company’s progress.
Good report – yet for many of us too late we have invested and developed alternatives with vendors that know how we work. We are yet to get the Kaseya message here in the UK. Loyal partners have been abandoned only to get annual invoices as their only point of contact.
Austen: Thanks for reinforcing one of the key points in our coverage. I’ve heard that lump-sum billing story from more than a handful of MSPs now. I do think Kaseya is making progress. But I also realize many of Kaseya’s rivals have made an unwavering commitment to MSPs for a decade or more.
Thanks again for reading ChannelE2E.
-jp
We are a long time Kaseya customer who has hung in there, mostly because nothing else out there was way more compelling and the thought of ripping out 2500 endpoints was unattractive. We’ve had high level resources from Kaseya in our offices eating crow in the past few months. We’ve had them offer to clean up our 8 year old database for nothing. The core product has always been pretty solid (if not user friendly). IMO opinion they’re doing enough to stop the exodus of customers to Labtech and the like, but the real question is how many MSPs would choose them if they were picking a product from scratch today? Kaseya has lost a ton of ground on the “market leader” reputation and getting it back will be a long, slow trudge if it happens. The buzz around N-Able seems to be the strongest in my circles these days, which is interesting because back in the day (10 years ago) they were known to be vaporware with an AWESOME sales engine. I guess they’ve come a long way.
Hey Dave: Always good to hear from you. Thanks for the context. You bring up a great point about “what would MSPs choose” if they were just starting today… … … Hmmm…
-jp
Good post Joe. Unfortunately as some have said, too little too late for a huge number of clients. Kaseya has long taken the “You’re lucky to get to pay us a lot of money to provide you with our magical software that we haven’t updated in three years” approach for way too long. We finally moved off it this year and couldn’t be happier. We finally are working with a responsive company that cares about the 10k+ nodes we have, works with us on support, and proactively reaches out to see how things are going. Kaseya only communicated with us when we got a new account rep (which happened every 6 months) or when they wanted to invoice us.
Am I bitter…maybe….but its an accurate representation of their lack of vision, clarity around who their customer is, and extremely poor execution over the last five years.
Hey Nick,
Thanks for sharing the perspectives. The more I think about Kaseya and current CEO Fred Voccola, the more I think of this simple story: I’m currently getting back to the gym (nearly daily). The previous owner of my body (Lazy Joe) enjoyed some success and got soft. Now, I’m working twice as hard just to get back to where I was. Overall, I’m happy with some of my progress but I know I’m gonna have to earn it each day… and this won’t be an overnight transformation. I think CEO Fred Voccola and the Kaseya management team currently are on a similar journey with MSPs. Some relationships won’t be rebuilt, but I do think they’re showing signs of hitting the gym…
PS: Road trip 2016. Where and when? In touch soon.
Best,
-jp
Joe,
That’s a great analogy. Hope they continue on the right track. Too bad its a bit late for some, but great for those that have stuck it out.
Road trip – Lets go somewhere fun. Ummm. Seattle? How about fly into Portland, tool around, road trip to Seattle!
> Portland to Seattle: That sounds like a plan. I’ll have my people contact your people (I guess that means my iPhone will be dialing whatever smartphone you’re carrying these days).
-jp