Kaseya continues to drive MSP success

Driving MSP success has been a core factor for Kaseya’s focus as it continues to make waves in the market with Kaseya 365.

This is something that will continue to be at forefront for the IT management and cyber security vendor, long after CEO Fred Voccola transitions from the top role to vice chairman. A decision he announced to the market in January.

Voccola is currently working with the board find a replacement to help the company through its next stage of growth. 

More than 10 years ago, Voccola commenced the Kaseya journey with Frank Tisellano, Paul Farr and Alex Cuevas.

“We started looking at Kaseya and putting together a strategy that would be earth shattering, because it was an RMM company at the time and it was struggling a bit,” Voccola told ARN. 

As it looked under the hood, Voccola said it spotted a couple of trends evolving in the market. 

“You had to be blind not to see it, that small- to mid-sized businesses from five to 100 employees, were continuing to make up a larger portion of the global economy,” he said. 

“The reason for that is because the business and industrial systems that allowed enterprise companies to have all the productivity gains in the 90s and 2000s – those systems were now getting simpler, coming downstream.

“What was enabling small- to mid-sized businesses to take a disproportionate part of economic growth was the technology used. This was made available and secure by MSPs, holding the global economy as they enable these systems that small- to mid-sized businesses needed to compete.

Voccola also discovered that MSPs were running at a 10 percent profit margin, on average.

“If you run your business at a 10 percent profit margin, you can’t make real investments and you can’t afford to lose one customer,” he said. “There’s no room for error and that’s really bad.”

Digging deeper into problems MSPs faced, Voccola said in the early days, the average MSP was using multiple products from different vendors to deliver a managed service. 

“Importantly, those products were not purpose built for MSPs. They were built for the enterprise with enterprise pricing and they were not integrated together. When something is not integrated, you can’t build automation,” he said. 

“This is when we decided to build a platform that will have every single piece of functionality that an MSP needs to deliver all of the managed services for their customers and internal facing business applications that the MSP needs, like billing, CRM and ticketing. 

“That was the original mission when we started on the journey. If everything went that smoothly, life would have been great, but like everything, it is a little more complicated.”

During the past decade, Kaseya has snapped up about 17 organisations, with Voccola estimating it has spent up to US$14 billion investing in the Kaseya platform, IT Complete.

Since launching Kaseya 365 nine months ago, Voccola said it was generating close to US$200 million in recurring revenue with about 8000 MSPs using the platform. 

The Kaseya 365 subscription is inclusive of all the functionality of remote monitoring and management (RMM), antivirus protection, endpoint detection and response (EDR), managed detection and response (MDR), patch management, ransomware rollback and endpoint backup. 

“One SKU utterly changed the entire MSP industry in eight months,” he said. 

“The hard dollar savings MSPs are achieving, we’ve changed the fundamental unit economics in the business – it’s a monster milestone.”

It was at this point, Voccola said he felt it was the right time to step down from the CEO role and find the next person to take the business to the next level.

“I’ll be guiding them as well, managing the product strategy, M&A and all that, but I don’t want to be doing 80 hours per week anymore,” he said.  

“There’s very little doubt that Kaseya 365 will be ubiquitous with every MSP in the industry over the next two, three years. If someone’s not on Kaseya 365 or components of it, they won’t be able to financially compete, it’s that simple.”

During the past few months, Kaseya has significantly boosted its executive team with promoting Dermot McCann, Michael Sanders as its CRO, hiring Ranjan Singh as CPO and Ryan Courson as the new COO.

In the past year, Kaseya grew 17 per cent organically, with profit margins more than 38 per cent and more than US$1 billion in revenue. 

“We look at what we have done so far at Kaseya and I want to emphasise this – it’s just the beginning. We’ll be a US$10 billion revenue company very soon,” he said. “We really give a shit about the success of our partners.”

Voccola emphasised Kaseya was centered on delivering value to customers, partners, employees and shareholders. 

“Ten years ago we were a sinking ship and now we’re three times bigger, more profitable and growing faster than our competitors, and that’s because of the great partners we have and great employees,” he said. “Kaseya 365 is going to do for the MSP space what Microsoft Office did for productivity workers.

“We have a lot more to do and Kaseya partners are going to continue to dominate. MSPs ‘powered by Kaseya’ will be the ones that win.”