Kaseya Connect 2015: 5 Questions We’ll Be Asking

Kaseya wants managed service providers (MSPs) to leverage its products and services to grow their businesses, according to CEO Yogesh Gupta, and he’ll tell them more about how he plans to help them to that at Kaseya Connect 2015..

The Waltham, Massachusetts-based remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform provider’s success is tied to its MSP partners’ success, Gupta said.

This year’s Kaseya Connect will take place from April 12 to 16 in Orlando, Florida and feature:

• Business and technical training sessions
• Kaseya product lab and technical support meet and greet
• Kaseya food truck party
• Presentations from Gupta and other Kaseya executives
• Sponsor Pavilion

MSPmentor will be at the event, and here are five questions we’ll be asking:

1. Is Kaseya planning to partner with any PSA providers?

Gupta would neither confirm nor deny whether Kaseya plans to partner with any professional services automation (PSA) companies. However, he acknowledged that, “Anything is possible.”

Several PSA providers are already working with Kaseya as part of the Kaseya Technology Alliance Program, including:

• Autotask
• ConnectWise
• Tigerpaw Software

So what does the future hold for Kaseya in the PSA space? We should find out more from Gupta at Kaseya Connect 2015.

2. What’s on Kaseya’s product roadmap?

2014 was busy for Kaseya – just consider some of the company’s accomplishments during the year:

• Nearly 70 percent of Kaseya’s new customers purchased its cloud offering, and new cloud subscriptions grew by almost 40 percent year over year.
• Kaseya saw 60 percent growth in the number of mailboxes under management in 2014, with more than 2 million total Microsoft Office 365 mailboxes now under Kaseya management worldwide.
• Kaseya’s identity and access management (IAM) revenue rose 45 percent in the second half of 2014 year over year.

How will Kaseya keep pace in 2015 and beyond? Gupta will outline his company’s product roadmap for this year and into the early part of 2016 during his keynote address.

3. Is Kaseya planning to make any acquisitions?

Kaseya acquired IAM solutions provider Scorpion Software last year and cloud application management tool 365 Command in 2013, but does the company plan to make any acquisitions this year?

Gupta said his company could announce new partnerships during the conference. He also will provide an update on the IT management industry’s future.

“IT management today is still done in an old-fashioned way,” Gupta said. “I think this is about to change.”

4. What are Kaseya’s plans for the cloud?

Gupta pointed out that he’s seeing more interest in Kaseya’s cloud solutions, particularly from on-premise customers.

Kaseya Chief Technology Officer Prakash Khot will discuss the anatomy and impact of today’s new cloud technologies at the conference. In addition, Khot will describe how the Kaseya Virtual System Administrator (VSA) platform can help customers “access levels of scalability, security and performance that they would not have the means to build on their own.”

5. How are MSPs responding to Kaseya 9’s disruptive EMM price?

Kaseya released version 9 of its RMM platform in February that included an enterprise mobility management (EMM) component priced at $1 per user per month and available to MSPs either a la carte or as part of the overall Kaseya R9 package.

Gupta told MSPmentor that competitors in the RMM space were offering prices of $3 to $5 per user per month for their EMM technology, and if MSPs opt for Kaseya’s $10 per user per year price, they can charge customers $20 and make a margin of 50 percent.

So what do MSPs think of the R9 EMM thus far? We’ll find out during Kaseya Connect 2015.

What else should MSPmentor ask during Kaseya Connect 2015? Share your thoughts about this story in the Comments section below, via Twitter @dkobialka or email me at dan.kobialka@penton.com.