Kaseya has released version 9 of its remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform, and the big change in the new version is an enterprise mobility management component, priced at $1 per user per month and available to managed service providers either a la carte or as part of the overall Kaseya R9 package. Kaseya also announced new infrastructure for the software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of its RMM offering.

But first more on the EMM news.

Disruptive pricing

The $1 price (or $10 per user per year) represents a disruptive new low and a bold move by Kaseya to woo IT service providers with an a la cart offering first – a foot in the door to potential deeper sales in the future as the RMM market becomes more competitive.

And the price is very disruptive. Good Technology last week released its own EMM suite and dropped its price to $3 per user per month – a price reduction, but one that remains well above what Kaseya is offering.  

EMM pricing that offers profit potential

Yogesh Gupta, CEO of Kaseya, said the new pricing was designed with MSP profit margins in mind.

“We wanted to enable our MSPs to have the greatest margin when they deliver an EMM service,” he told MSPmentor. He noted that his competitors in the RMM space were offering prices of $3 to $5 per user per month for their EMM technology. If MSPs opt for the $10 per user per year price, they can charge customers $20 and make a margin of 50 percent.

Kaseya executives say the R9 EMM combines several features into a single offering that can be managed via a single console or integrated into the overall Kaseya RMM platform and managed from that console.

Kaseya’s EMM features

The new EMM release includes features for mobile device management (MDM), mobile application management (MAM), and bring your own device (BYOD). Administrators can deploy consistent, pre-defined polices to enrolled devices.

Industry analyst Steve Brasen of EMA said that per user pricing for the EMM suite lines up with where the market is going. His own research has revealed that 89 percent of users are using multiple devices.

“The disruptive price point opens Kaseya up to another marketplace,” he told MSPmentor.

Mobility management has been a tough sell for managed service providers who have found resistance from customers that don’t want to pay more for support on devices that need very little support, especially if they are owned by the user. The resistance and other market shifts have led to more organizations pricing services based on the number of users supported instead of the number of devices. A $1 per user per month price could make it easier for MSPs to bundle those EMM services to the entire package at a price that  is easier for SMB customers to swallow.

Kaseya’s new cloud infrastructure

On the infrastructure side, Kaseya announced a re-architecting of its private cloud infrastructure. Gupta said that the private cloud will be faster than the on-premise implementations still favored by many of its customers. That’s because it is built with flash memory.  It also includes a host of security upgrades such as enhanced perimeter protection, built in identity and access management, network intrusion detection, system redundancy and quick failover capability.

Kaseya is not forcing its on-premise customers to move to the cloud. But executives are hoping that its new infrastructure will persuade more of those customers to make the move.

“The goal for us, over the next 12 months, is to aggressively grow the cloud customer base more so than anything else,” Gupta told me. “We do offer an on-premise offering, but we see the world moving to the cloud and so do our customers.”