Eric Emerson, President, E-Squared IT

“This is the kind of market consolidation that is straight-up not great for business or competition. Datto had a great thing going with its RMM and line of products and the deep integrations, and they had a great channel presence. I always felt taken care of by them. It is honestly a bit rough to see them get purchased.

“Alternatively, Unitrends is in no way as feature-rich as the Datto backup suite of products, so it would be great to see Unitrends get jettisoned into the sun permanently and have Datto be the de-facto SMB backup product in the field.

“If we can torch VSA in lieu of Autotask and bring the level of integration of the stack of products that Datto had been working on, great!

“Also, Kaseya has an absolutely trash record of auto-renewing three-year aggressive contracts which are extremely one-sided and really hurt up-and-coming MSPs. Forcing a three-year deal on something like Datto Backup products doesn’t make sense and would make the partner assume all liability.

“All in all, this could be great, in a sense, because Kaseya is lacking in some of the products that Datto excels at. However, Kaseya’s track record with companies they’ve purchased have been absolutely abysmal, so I’m not getting my hopes up.

“The ideal situation would be that Datto stays exactly the same and nothing changes, but we know that’s not going to happen.”