Kaseya executives have made their message crystal clear to managed services providers (MSPs) in attendance at Kaseya Connect 2014: Kaseya has plans to become The IT Management Cloud Company.

But this push for MSPs to “take control of the cloud” leads to the question: Do MSPs want the remote monitoring and management (RMM) company to turn into a cloud-based management company?

During his keynote presentation yesterday, Kaseya President and CEO Yogesh Gupta repeatedly made note of several leading cloud services providers (CSPs), including Dropbox, Salesforce.com and Microsoft Office 365.

He also mentioned that IT management is “absolutely moving to the cloud,” and Kaseya wants to be the de-facto IT management cloud platform for MSPs and mid-market enterprises.

When will Kaseya customers be ready to move to cloud? Gupta told MSPmentor that the decision is up to them.

“If our customers want to move to a cloud platform today they can,” he said. “If they want to wait a year or two, that’s fine.”

Randal Kohutek, vice president of operations at Simpleworks, a Colorado-based MSP, said Kaseya will eventually transition to a pure cloud platform.

“It’s very obvious that there are going to be features that are cloud only, and now they’re attempting to make it easier to expedite people to moving to the cloud, and all that does, unfortunately, is it costs operational time on our side and pads their pockets.”

Ryan Meyer, managed services manager at Alliance Technologies, an Iowa-based MSP, told MSPmentor that it’s not viable for Kaseya to move its platform to a software as a service (SaaS)-only model.

“Clients like us may be reluctant to do so for compliancy, performance, and other reasons, which would lead to a notable loss of revenue,” he said.

He added: “They may push us (e.g., SaaS gets quicker updates or better support), but that is just likely to cause customer complaints and blowback.”

Gupta said there isn’t a deadline for when Kaseya would like its partners to move to cloud, adding that he doesn’t believe it will be in the next three years.

“We want to make sure that when they’re ready, we’re ready for them,” he said.

Gupta said Kaseya will provide both business and technical tracks for on-prem customers looking to make the shift to the cloud.

“We don’t today have a very smooth path for them,” he said, “but we do want to make it so it is significantly easier, and we will get there. That is our goal.”

But new customers, on the other hand, are showing more interest in the RMM company’s cloud-based platform.

“In the last six months, an interesting thing happened in the second half of 2013,” Gupta said. “For the first time in the history of Kaseya, more new customers of Kaseya chose our cloud products than our on-premise products.”

As of now, only a small percentage of on-prem customers have moved to Kaseya’s cloud offering, Gupta said. He noted that nearly 80 percent of Kaseya’s customer base is still on-prem.

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