In April, Kaseya introduced Kaseya 365—an all-in-one subscription for endpoint management with an eye-poppingly low price—to a lot of fanfare. Then the critics weighed in. Now that some of the dust has settled, we decided to take a look at the pros and cons—straight from MSP business owners, and they don’t hold back.
The Goals: Shake, Rattle, And Roll
With Kaseya 365, the company has several goals:
- Shake up the MSP economic model to make MSPs more profitable and get them paid what they deserve,
- Rattle the notion that MSPs must manage disparate tools from various vendors, and
- Roll as many MSP partners as possible into Kaseya 365 to transform the industry in the same way Microsoft Office did and make Kaseya clients the best MSPs in the industry.
Choosing tools and vendors is critical and potentially dangerous for MSPs. Deals that seem too good to be true often come with hidden costs. Here’s what MSPs have to say.
Does The Math Add Up?
Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola unveiled the new Kaseya 365 subscription in April at the Kaseya Connect Global conference, promising a boost in profits by up to 50% and increased efficiency through automation and integration. The license includes remote monitoring and management (RMM), antivirus protection, endpoint detection and response (EDR), managed detection and response (MDR), patch management, ransomware rollback, and endpoint backup, plus 20 core automations. The introductory price was $3.99 per endpoint per month for Kaseya 365 Pro and $1.75 for Kaseya 365 Express (without the MDR). After June 23, the price went to $5.25 for Pro and $2.25 for Express—still significantly lower than competitors’ individual products.
Dawn Disher, CFO of Southwest Networks, an MSP based in Palm Desert, California, says they were already using most of the tools in the bundle, except for antivirus and EDR, so they signed up. However, she notes, getting the deal required them to increase their overall spend with Kaseya by 25%. But now that they don’t need their previous antivirus product, their costs will go down, she says. “Basically, I’m spending more with Kaseya, but less overall.”
That’s also the case for Brian Smith, president of IT Now! Technology Group, an MSP in Clarklake, Michigan. He had most of the products in the bundle and wanted to sign up immediately but didn’t want to spend more money on the Kaseya products. “It kind of felt like they didn’t want to give it to me [the introductory pricing] at first,” he says, but after some back and forth with his rep, he settled on upping his spend with Kaseya about 10% for additional licenses. Overall, he says, it cut his cost per goods for those individual products by a little more than 50% but he’s spending about the same.
However, he says, “I have more products and I have more licenses to give out in the future too, and I’m locked into that price. I believe I’ll save money over what I would have been spending before.”
Kaseya’s Partner First Pledge, an initiative introduced at the Connect conference, includes a price lock guarantee capping any increase in current customers’ product pricing to a maximum of 5%, plus adjustments for inflation upon contract renewal.
For Tito Huynh, vice president of Business Data Services, an MSP in Overland Park, Kansas, “The pricing was a no-brainer. The price is less than the cost of some of the tools that we had by themselves.” The timing made sense for him, too, since they have outgrown their current RMM and were looking to make a switch.
Business Data Services is currently testing Kaseya 365 internally before rolling it out to customers. Says Huynh, “If everything tests out the way we want it to and the way Kaseya says in their presentations, then we’re going to switch out the RMM.”
While they’re still in the testing phase, “if there is an incident and we can remediate as fast as they say, or if there’s a backup restore request and we can restore it as fast as they say, it’s going to up the productivity for our team a lot,” notes Huynh. “And when you up the productivity of your IT team, that means there’s more profit to the bottom line.”
It’s Not All About Math
Price is important, of course, but for some MSPs, there are other considerations when it comes to changing your basic stack. Even though Neal Juern, CEO of 7tech, an MSP and MSSP in San Antonio, Texas, is already using Kaseya’s Datto Backup and IT Glue, “we’re just doing things from a security perspective that make it really hard for us to take advantage of what Kaseya launched. Just the switching of all those platforms might cost us more than the savings for two or three years.”
The concept of Kaseya 365 “makes sense for Kaseya as a company,” says Lawrence Cruciana, who runs his MSP, CorpInfoTech, in Charlotte, North Carolina, on a different platform. “I think it allows them to better control their investment in their development and their support. If everyone has the same access to the same product, and it’s a simplified licensing and consumption strategy, everyone wins from that.”
Like Juern, though, he is not contemplating Kaseya 365 because of the heavy lift of switching his current stack. “That’s a painful consideration,” says Cruciana. “It gives me chills just thinking about it.”
Does Putting All Your Eggs In One Basket Create The Risk Of Getting Fried?
There’s always been a debate over best of breed vs. going all in with one vendor. Juern highlights the risk of vendor lock-in, saying, “If you’re using everything under one umbrella and there’s something going wrong with this one product, you’re kind of stuck. That’s not good for the end client, and it’s also not good for you as the provider.”
Still, he acknowledges, getting better pricing and more cohesive management for a vendor bundle can be “super advantageous.”
Security issues, though, could pose a bigger risk than vendor lock-in since a breach in an MSP’s RMM, for instance, potentially gives hackers the keys to all their customers.
“If there’s a big vulnerability with Kaseya, then it affects all the clients, and then if there’s key integrations, it could affect it more,” says Huynh. But he says it’s less about having all your eggs in one basket than setting up your security controls properly, which every MSP should be doing.
A vulnerability in the software is “probably the biggest fear of any MSP,” says Smith, but adds that no vendor is immune. He is taking steps to mitigate that possibility with an additional non-Kaseya security product.
While Cruciana calls the ecosystem risk “tremendous,” he believes Kaseya has the resources and security maturity “to understand how big of a target that puts on their back and to respond appropriately to that target.” He adds, “I think they have the right people in a lot of the right seats on that bus to understand what the risk is for what they’re doing—especially if all of a sudden, everyone’s using all of their products.”
How MSPs Will Use Their Savings
When Voccola introduced Kaseya 365, he suggested a few ways MSPs could use their savings: drop customer prices as a competitive advantage, invest in the business, pocket your profits. We asked the newly signed up what their plans are.
Huynh says Business Data Services was previously selling some of the Kaseya 365 solutions as add-ons, so now he’s rewriting their contracts “into a bigger, stronger package that meets the market’s needs” with an easier-to-understand service offering and simpler invoices. He’s also raising prices. “The idea is we’re going to raise prices and get extra profit for us so that we can invest in the company even more,” says Huynh, “whether that’s personnel, new services, or something that benefits the client.”
Ultimately, he expects to see a 5% increase in net profit.
For Smith, Kaseya 365 did lower costs and put more money in his pocket, but he says “I don’t think I’ll double my profits on this.” He plans to reinvest in the business and his marketing efforts—something he had on the roadmap anyway but now the savings makes it easier. In addition, while he doesn’t plan to lower prices across the board, he shares that “we just had a renewal come up in the QBR, and this guy’s fighting me back and forth on some things. He wanted to lower his contract, and we were able to put something together that I couldn’t have done two months ago. So yes, it did help seal a deal.”
Disher, too, says they could undercut the competition pricewise, but that’s not the plan for their company, which has an employee stock ownership program (ESOP).
Says Disher, “The plan is to let it go to the bottom line and increase the profitability of the company at this juncture. It doesn’t mean that next month we won’t make a different decision, but right now, it’s just more going to the bottom line … being able to set more aside for the employees.”
Will It Live Up To Expectations?
Overall, Huynh is optimistic. “The direction is very, very good, and I think we’re going to see this type of direction from Kaseya products with a lot more things, so I’m liking what I see so far.”
Indeed, in an interview with MSP Success at Connect, Voccola said Kaseya 365 is the foundation for what comes next.
Smith, who has been in the MSP business 15-plus years, has used products from several different companies. “They all have their pluses and minuses,” he notes, “but we’d be hard pressed to say, ‘OK, we’re going to get rid of Kaseya and go piecemeal everything together.’ There’s no way you could come in at this cost.”
So will Kaseya 365 shake, rattle, and roll the IT channel? Voccola has been teasing there’s more to come at DattoCon in October. Stay tuned.
