Kaseya Connect User Conference: Top 10 Keynote Highlights
During the Kaseya Connect User Conference this morning, CEO Gerald Blackie said the company is marching toward $100 million in annual revenues. Blackie and other Kaseya executives also described the bigger mission for Kaseya 2, a managed services platform that experienced a launch delay from 2009 to early 2010. And that’s not all. Here are 10 highlights from Blackie’s keynote plus additional observations from Kaseya Executive VP Jim Alves and President Mark Sutherland.
1. Going Global: Kaseya will add a Kaseya Connect conference in Europe or Asia in 2011, according to Blackie.
2. Who’s here?: Roughly 250 managed services provider (MSP) companies are here, representing about five percent of Kaseya’s global MSP base. Translation: It sounds like Kaseya now has about 5,000 MSP customers worldwide. Also, Blackie says the attendees represent about 750,000 endpoints in the room — though I need to check if those endpoints represent active endpoints or licensed endpoints that are still waiting for customers.
3. Kaseya Business Update: Blackie says Kaseya now has 5 million endpoints, 400 employees, no debt, and no venture capital. The company is profitable and cash-flow positive. “We can chart our own destiny as we near the nine-figure revenue mark,” Blackie asserts. Translation: $100 million in annual revenues sounds within Kaseya’s reach. Still, I need to check how many of those 5 million endpoints are actually active.
4. Single Pane of Glass Automation: Blackie described how Kaseya hopes to offer a single framework that resembles ERP in power and an operating system in terms of open APIs (application programming interfaces). But it’s going to take time. Blackie mentioned that the new Kaseya 2 platform is “not version 5. It’s an entirely new framework. It wasn’t a simple upgrade.”
5. Kaseya 2: Alves and Sutherland further described the vision for the Kaseya 2 platform. The K2 platform has taken some heat from some MSPmentor readers who allege the platform contained key bugs and had heavy resource requirements upon its February 2010 launch.
Alves and Sutherland described how K2 is a platform for the next decade, “or at least the next five years,” quipped Sutherland. Added Blackie: “It’s about the climb to K2. Getting to the top is logistically tough.”
The deeper point: Moving to Kaseya 2 requires careful planning. Sutherland also conceded that K2 experienced some Ajax-related development challenges in mid-2009, forcing the company to delay the platform until early 2010. But Sutherland assured attendees that Kaseya had addressed the issues.
“Now that we have the Kaseya 2 platform in place, the whole idea is to layer functionality and applications on top,” says Alves. “Now that we have a platform in place we can go deep in functionality.”
6. Where’s the Cloud?: The initial K2 release is an on-premises offering. Blackie says a cloud offering — dubbed Kaseya Kloud, apparently, is in beta test and has key SaaS partners in place such as Ingram Micro (Australia, I believe), Jamcracker and ASCII Group.
Also, I’m still checking to see if Kaseya has formalized its SaaS pricing. And ultimately, it sounds to me like Kaseya SaaS remains a work in progress.
7. More Stuff Coming: Sutherland and Alves described how Kaseya 2 will increasingly support discovery, inventory, hardware asset management, software asset management, agent procedures and custom reports. Alves also said Kaseya will remain an agent-based platform.
8. Cross Platform: Sutherland described how K2 will support a broad mix of Unix/Linux devices, Macintoshes, iPads and other emerging platforms. “Every business has a Mac or two or 20 in them,” said Sutherland. “Macs are a first-class citizen in the Kaseya world.”
9. Plug In Your Applications: Blackie promised that Kaseya would offer a “complete exposure of APIs,” so that software developers and MSPs could plug additional applications into the platform. Also, Alves says any and all parties will be able to integrate into the K2 framework. I suspect online backup and security software companies will likely be the first to leverage the APIs, based on several side conversations here at the conference.
10. Security and Backup: Blackie hinted that Kaseya will work more closely with Kaspersky Lab (security) and Acronis (backup software). Sutherland confirmed that Kaseya will switch its anti-virus engine from AVG to Kaspersky Lab in a few months.
Meanwhile, I’m still pursuing answers to five key questions that I raised ahead of the conference. More thoughts on MSPmentor really soon. Plus, here’s a recap from Day One (June 1) in case you missed it.
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Toward the end of the keynote, Kaseya executives essentially apologized for poor support during the K2 launch. One executive conceded that it was a “crisis” but ticket volumes are now down to a reasonable point and more support hires have been made. Support quality wasn’t the issue, rather support timeliness was the big concern, the Kaseya executive conceded.
“A number of you stopped calling because you thought nobody was picking up the phones,” said the Kaseya executive. “Give us a call. I can’t guarantee immediate access, but we are getting more available and more responsive.”
Alves, meanwhile, promised easier access to training so that MSPs will have a better user of the product. Also, Kaseya is striving to get back to 90% support satisfaction rates. That figure sounds like it dipped during the K2 launch.
-jp
Nice recap Joe. However from my seat, it seemed like I was in a time warp back to last year and the year before. Kaseya has been talking about a mobile agent and a Linux agent for years – and we still have nothing. The recent support issues are identical to what happened when Kaseya 2008 launched.
The overall vision and roadmap are just as murky as before and overall I have to wonder if Kaseya is still looking into the small business MSP environment or if they have really set their sights higher and are more interested in penetrating larger organizations. Many of the things they are talking about are either too complex for a small MSP or IT department to implement or just aren’t needed in typical small MSP.
I’m not saying that it is a problem to aim higher, but I’m interested in what my maintenance pays for and how it applies to me – and not how I can help bankroll their expansion into markets that I am not setup to or not interested in servicing.
Jason: I can’t debate you. Some of what I heard today reminded me of 2008 and 2009.
2008: Seemed like Kaseya opened the conference with a strong apology for some of the upgrade bumps attendees had experienced. This time around (2010), it sounds like the support headaches involved too many upgrades too soon involving too broad a list of IT environments. Kaseya didn’t outright apologize today but they conceded their support lines were overwhelmed in early 2010.
2009: I too recall multiple statements about Kaseya on mobile devices and Linux. I apologize for not having a better feel for where Kaseya has delivered and where they still need to deliver.
Overall, I think the stakes are higher in 2010. Bigger platform. Enterprise ambitions. I don’t think the vision is murky. I do think that executing on the long list of promised features/plugins would be a challenge for any company.
-jp