Kaseya’s Fred Voccola announced earlier this month that he was transitioning from the daily grind of CEO to vice chairman. After 10 years of 80-hour weeks, 18 acquisitions, and billions in R&D to build the IT Complete architecture, the cornerstone of the Kaseya 365 platform, Voccola said the “time was right.” In addition to sending shockwaves through the industry, it has fueled an inordinate amount of speculation about the Kaseya leadership change. We asked Voccola to tell it to us straight, and he did. This is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.
MSP Success: Let’s start with some “myth busters.” First one: There’s been speculation that you’re making yourself available for a position in the Trump or DeSantis administration. True or false?
Fred Voccola: I’ve been incredibly blessed to have been raised the way I was raised by my parents, and they taught me a couple of very important values in life. One of them is the country that we live in—and we have our faults—is by far the best in the world. It has given me and my family the opportunity to do so many amazing things. It would be one of the greatest honors in my life to be able to give back to our country and our society, whether it’s at a national level or a state level, because ultimately, that’s the way you can help the most people. If there was ever a chance for me to give back and help millions of people in our country, I would do it in a second.
MSP Success: OK, second myth buster: There was a financial issue. Did the rollout out Kaseya 365 Endpoint and User negatively impact profits?
Voccola: No, it’s the other way around. Kaseya had a record financial year. We had over 16% growth, over 38% EBITDA margins at a company that’s over $1.5 billion. You talk to 10 private equity firms; they’ll say that’s best-in-the-world performance.
Ten years ago, the company was doing about $50 million of recurring revenue. It was worth maybe $150 million, maybe losing money. Now, we’re doing $1.5 billion plus, making $600 million-plus in profit.
MSP Success: Final myth buster: It’s highly unusual for a company of Kaseya’s size to announce a change in leadership without a succession plan in place. Can you address that?
Voccola: Yeah, I can. So over the last 10 months we’ve been planning this. We upgraded our executive team top to bottom. We have a new chief operating officer, a new chief marketing officer, a new head of HR. We’ve always had a fantastic head of product—Ranjan Singh, who’s been here for 3-plus years. Mike Sanders has taken over as chief revenue officer. He’s phenomenal. We have a new head of worldwide support that just started. We promoted a person to run worldwide R&D. We’ve had dozens and dozens of junior executives that we’ve brought on board just for this reason.
Now the direct question, is it unusual? I don’t know if it’s unusual or not. There is a plan. The plan is, get the team in place and then let’s go find my successor. The only thing that’s maybe a little bit different is that we were transparent about this from the beginning, very similar to the way that we handled the security incident that we experienced a couple of years back.
Here’s why we want to be transparent. Our MSP partners, on average, spend about 8 to 10% of their annual revenue with us. There’s no other B2B company in the world like it. That’s why we call our customers “partners,” because it’s a true partnership, and it’s very important that we’re transparent, because when they’re spending that much of their revenue with us they need to know the strategy is not changing.
MSP Success: You are so close to rolling out the final parts of your strategic plan to change the unit economics of MSP. Why not stay on as CEO until you announced the final part of the plan at Kaseya Connect Global this spring, as you’ve talked about?
Voccola: This is a personal thing. This company has been my life for the last decade plus, and I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing. One of things that my dad [a pioneer of electronic toll collections and in-vehicle navigation] always told me was, “If you find a big problem that impacts a lot of people and you solve that problem—you really solve it—and you make it easy for people to accept your solution, you change the world.”
But your question, why not wait until the mission is complete? The mission was to change the unit economics for MSPs, so their profit margins can be closer to 40%. The mission will never be done, but IT Complete is the architecture, and Kaseya 365, which we launched in May, was a starting point. Our 7,000 partners already on Kaseya 365 have added well over $160 million of recurring revenue with the platform in 7 months. Much more importantly we’ve added over $1 billion of profitability for our partners in the MSP industry. That’s never been done. Ever. We changed the industry. That was the monster milestone. It was a monster homerun.
MSP Success: Is the board committed to following through on your strategic plan?
Voccola: One hundred percent. I’m the vice chairman of the board and in charge of corporate strategy.
MSP Success: You’ve been the face of Kaseya for 10 years, and you have a big personality. Will it be difficult for a new CEO to establish themselves?
Voccola: Absolutely not. Because the board members, including Kevin Thompson, Mike Triplett, and myself, are going to hire someone who’s a thousand times better than me. And when that CEO comes on board, I am here to help. Every CEO has their own style, but I can tell you the mission and the strategy of what we are doing will not change.
MSP Success: Do you think competitors will see the Kaseya leadership change as a vulnerable time for the company while the search is underway for a new CEO?
Voccola: I do think competitors will see it as an opportunity. Everything is an opportunity right? But I’ll tell you something. No vendor, except Kaseya, solves the most important problem that an MSP faces. Could the platform be better? Every product can always be better. But the good news is we spend more than 3x to 5x on R&D than every competitor combined. So competition’s always good, and I like to say, “Bring it,” because Kaseya will continue to dominate them.
MSP Success: I’m sure you saw a lot of the comments after your announcement. Some people are huge fans of Kaseya, others not so much. Why do you think Kaseya can be polarizing?
Voccola: When you are the 800-pound gorilla, everyone targets you. There are things that we can do better, and we will do better. But I think when you look at the numbers, many more people love the value they get from Kaseya than hate it.
I will say this. We have a huge focus on customer experience. We are going to direct just as much innovation as we did in 2024 on Kaseya 365 toward the overall experience of working with Kaseya in 2025. We’re going to make it much easier, much smoother, much better. Our partners demand a level of experience, and they deserve a level of experience, that is not top in industry, but the top in the industry. That’s a big focal point of the next CEO, making sure that not only do we continue the strategy of having the best platform at the best price, but making sure that we have the best experience.
MSP Success: Last week, Canalys predicted that 3 of the top 5 RMM/PSA leaders will be public by the end of the year. Will Kaseya be one of them?
Voccola: Kaseya will be a public company. I don’t know when. There’s a lot of things that go into taking a company public, and Kaseya has been on that journey for about a year.
MSP Success: Can we expect more acquisitions?
Voccola: Yes. We’ve got to make sure that we continue to keep our platform complete [with new innovations], and we will do that.
I can’t tell you if we’ll be announcing an acquisition at Kaseya Connect in April, but it won’t matter. The things that will be announced at Connect are going to blow people’s socks off. There’s a two-letter acronym that’s pretty popular these days. I think you’re going to see a lot around that. We have more used tactical AI than most B2B companies in the world. Our partners are consuming usable, meaningful AI on a daily basis. You’ll see things in Vegas that will be the end of the end for any inefficiencies MSPs have. We’re super jazzed.
