Kaseya’s Fred Voccola: Unorthodox, Unabashed and Unstoppable

… Austin McChord, a Datto founder and one of America’s wealthiest individuals, who was lamenting the sale of Datto to Kaseya. “There is a concern that the current trajectory from Datto’s new owners will snuff the flame that makes Datto a place to come ‘do your life’s work,’” McChord wrote. It was the kind of dust-up headline writers dream about, but you have to wonder if McChord, a well-known techy, may have picked a fight with the wrong guy. Voccola clearly possesses both busi­ness and street smarts. Either way, the matter dissipated in a few weeks.

Whether it was born out of some of the challenges of integrating Datto or was just Kaseya growing up, Voccola wants the organization to be a great listener. That’s why he requires 20 members of his leadership team to conduct six pulse checks (as he calls them) each month with MSPs to discuss how the company is doing, what it could be doing better and to identify trends. “We talk to customers all day long, so that’s about 1,000 a year. I personally talked to 500 MSPs and I get to hear what’s not working, what people think the market is going to do, what it’s not going to do. Then we aggregate this data.”

Perhaps that’s the engine of Voccola’s influence: to aggregate what the company is hearing and take that data to bring better visibility to every MSP who works with Kaseya.

The Best Thing in MSP Land by Far

There’s no doubt that the owners and leaders of managed services organizations gravitate toward individuals who are plain-spoken, in the trenches and maybe a little rough around the edges. They have always viewed such people as trustworthy, willing to give them straight answers and not sugarcoat market realities. That’s what makes Voccola so appealing to MSPs. He also possesses a genuine fond­ness for the channel and is quick to point out that a large number of Kaseya employees have spent the bulk of their careers working in the channel or for Kaseya.

He is an influencer who is not without flaws, but he makes no apologies. “There is another decade of huge spending. Small and midsize companies are in the middle of digitally transforming. The applications that transformed Caterpil­lar, Coca-Cola and Citibank, in the ‘90s, and 2000s are now becoming available for small businesses and midsize businesses to implement, which they’re doing. Now those applications are mission-critical for the local restaurant.”

“So as the economy slows down and gets worse, the need to digitally transform accelerates even further, which means that MSPs are going to get a disproportionately higher per­centage of the GDP than they would otherwise,” Voccola said.

No matter what lies ahead, Voccola is making the MSP market much more interesting these days.

“People are cooking up popcorn and watching Fred. It is the best thing in MSP land by far,” said an MSP 501 CEO. With Kaseya’s profits and revenue growing at greater than 30%, what better show could there be to watch in 2023?

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