At the sold-out annual customer conference taking place in Miami, Kaseya’s Fred Voccola reflects on the benefits of the Kaseya-Datto integration and innovations meant to drive MSP profits.
At Kaseya DattoCon 2023, Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola told the packed room of attendees at the annual customer conference how the company has focused on closing the “space between” the Datto and Kaseya products and communities to better address what he calls the “space between” tools that are not integrated, automated, and fully utilized. “That space between creates challenges that are unique to MSPs,” Voccola said. It’s a challenge he aims to solve with the Kaseya IT Complete platform.
In his Tuesday morning keynote at the sold-out DattoCon 2023 running October 2-4 at the InterContinental in Miami, Voccola announced new capabilities for the Kaseya IT Complete platform, which include advances in the company’s AI roadmap, a new FLEXspend backup program, and a secure payments service. Voccola also reflected on the 466 days since Kaseya acquired Datto, and what the investment has produced for its MSP partners, acknowledging both the thrill of accomplishing a swift integration and apologizing for a few missteps along the way.
He spoke to some of the objectives he laid out at last year’s DattoCon: to accelerate innovation, lower prices, ‘Datto-ify’ the MSP experience, and unify the partner experience.
In terms of innovation, Voccola said Kaseya has added over 300 engineers to its R&D and product organizations and launched thousands of features across the IT Complete platform, and over 400 “killer features,” which Voccola defined as “something you folks [MSP partners] will notice and receive value from.”
On pricing, he noted, “On average, we reduced prices 15%. That’s important because that allows products to be more affordable and you to make more money. A subtle note, we didn’t raise prices either.”
Voccola also spoke about what he learned during the first few months following the Datto acquisition. “I really understood how Datto operated in the MSP community and we tried to take as much of that as we could in integrating the companies. So, one of the things we did is the Datto Partner program became the Kaseya Partner program. All the leadership of that group, all the mid-level management [are] here running that group. The MDF aspects and the partner development funds, we have more than tripled.”
In addition, he told the audience that Kaseya has made a commitment to keep DattoCon “now and forever.”
Looking forward, Voccola spoke to the key opportunities for MSP partners: the fact that SMBs will continue to spend money on digital transformation, more organizations looking to adopt a co-managed model, and the ever-increasing need for cyber resiliency.
At the same time, MSPs face challenges of more competition; rising labor costs; and the increasing complexity of service delivery due to vendor fatigue, limited integration, poor utilization of tools, and the high cost of those tools. He noted that the average MSP spends 20% of recurring revenue on software and uses about 17 different products.
The vision for IT Complete—to offer deep workflow integration between product suites and modules within suites—is intended to address those challenges. “Integration between products is essential for any sort of automation to happen,” Voccola stressed. “Understanding that MSPs are multifunctional technicians is the entire thesis behind Kaseya as a company.”
Therefore, he said, “Our goal is to provide as much integration and as much automation as possible for our MSP customers.”
Voccola also highlighted some new capabilities in IT Complete to advance that goal.
Cooper Bots, the new business process automation solution, leverages the Cooper AI engine, an AI assistant designed to maximize the utility of Kaseya solutions that Kaseya introduced in 2021. Now, harnessing workflow integrations and AI assistance, Cooper Bots can autonomously handle hundreds of repetitive, labor-intensive tasks typically assigned to technicians.
To address the increasing demand for a versatile backup solution that allows for quick adjustment without negatively impacting profitability Kaseya announced the new FLEXspend for Backup program. FLEXspend gives MSP customers flexibility in adjusting their backup spend to whatever configuration is required as they shift workloads to public cloud, including Microsoft Azure, AWS, and beyond.
Finally, Kaseya’s new Secure Payments service is designed to eliminate noncompliance risk from MSPs’ customers, many of whom are not PCI compliant even though they accept online payments. While addressing this uncovered threat vector and enhancing the Kaseya Security Suite, this solution requires minimal effort from MSPs to implement and manage, and generates incremental revenue through payment environment optimization.
Concluding his keynote, Voccola said, “The last aspect of our platform is that it’s affordable,” priced a third to a half lower than competitors. Moreover, he said, “By adopting all the modules of IT Complete, that MSP is picking up huge amounts of integration, huge amounts of automation, which will allow that MSP to take on more revenue without having to add an equal amount of engineers, therefore improving its profit margins and its service delivery capabilities even further.”
He encouraged all attendees to take advantage of a program they call ProfitFuel, which requires just a four-hour commitment. “We’ll identify the financial opportunities that you will gain by migrating to the IT Complete stack, as well as the integrations and the automation that you’ll be obtaining … We’ve done this several hundred times in the last six months and the results are very, very, very powerful.”
He stressed, “We want every single MSP that is powered by Kaseya to be the best. We want MSPs that are not powered by Kaseya to ask the MSPs who are powered by Kaseya to buy them, because you’re putting them out of business.”
