Kaseya Rides 2018 Momentum Into the New Year

2018 was a big year for Kaseya, the business management software provider, which on Wednesday reported record-breaking growth last year. The company posted more than $250 million in annual bookings, completed four major acquisitions, grew to more than 1,000 employees nationwide, and now counts about 19,000 unique MSPs around the globe.

Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola told Channel Futures that the company’s continued commitment to building out its service offerings drives its strategy. The provider touts its IT Complete suite of products and services, designed to supply managed service providers (MSPs) and internal IT teams with all of the tools they need to build and support core IT infrastructure.

Kaseya’s Fred Voccola

Kaseya’s IT Complete offering is geared toward the small to midsize business (SMB) market, which Voccola says offers opportunities for any size of partner just about anywhere around the globe. Kaseya itself is banking on SMBs to grow its market share and partner base.

“I feel very blessed that we’re able to operate in the market we’re operating in,” said Voccola. “I don’t mean the stock market or the economy. I mean the market for small to midsize businesses. Their adoption of technology is exploding.”

Building IT Complete Through Acquisitions and Integrations

Voccola said that last year’s rush of acquisitions was in response to a massive tectonic shift in the global economy. Small businesses are driving economic growth because technology has given them a newfound ability to compete on a larger scale. Kaseya is just riding that wave, he tells us, and trying to stay a step ahead in terms of what the company can offer MSPs that helps them support the growing SMB market.

“[2018] was a busy year because we realized compliance is huge. IT documentation is … a must. And on the backup and disaster recovery side, that’s a big moneymaker for MSPs, and it’s also a big cost point,” Voccola explained. “So we went out and got better tech at a lower price.”

The most talked about of Kaseya’s four major acquisitions last year was that of backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution provider Unitrends. The company’s technology underlies Unitrends MSP and Kaseya Unified Backup, and the acquisition positioned Kaseya to better compete with providers such as Datto – which acquired Kaseya competitor Autotask in 2017 – with robust BDR offerings.

To capitalize on the growing market for compliance services, Kaseya bought RapidFire Tools, the popular threat detection and compliance solution software provider, and quickly began rolling out products to help partners spin up a compliance service for customers in highly regulated industries.

Kaseya’s acquisition of Spanning Cloud Apps gave its partners opportunities to make money off of Office 365 and G Suite, those necessary but often unprofitable parts of many MSPs’ offerings, by selling SaaS data protection for the cloud-based productivity suites. It ended the year by buying IT Glue, the uber-popular IT documentation software many MSPs rely on to increase technician efficiencies.

Voccola says that 2019 will be as busy, if not busier, in terms of acquisitions. While he wouldn’t give details, he said there would be …