Kaseya’s remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform has gotten an upgrade. VSA 9.5 is focused on security, cloud storage and enhanced management capabilities, but Fred Voccola, Kaseya CEO, told Channel Futures the “super-cool” features are geared toward easing the burden on support technicians.

Kaseya is highlighting the updated RMM’s more robust integration between its professional services automation (PSA) product and its business management solution (BMS). Voccola says that the new integration capabilities are a “light-year step forward,” leveraging features like automatic ticket de-duplication, ticket closing and ticket re-opening.

The enhanced features are guided by feedback from partners, the company said in a statement. Kaseya’s chief product officer, Mike Puglia, says that VSA delivers on Kaseya’s promise to MSPs to provide an RMM solution that evolves alongside customers and improves the overall experience of its IT Complete suite.

“Mike’s team is staffed with ex-MSP people,” Voccola told us. “Mike’s is a very practical, very humble, and very customer-centric product group. We’re so active with our advisory councils, making sure that we’re not just sitting in an ivory tower conjuring crazy ideas.”

The update is designed to increase the efficiency of support technicians so MSPs can devote more resources to creating bigger margins. For example, VSA 9.5 provides integration of Kaseya Policy Management with its Kaseya Cloud Backup (KCB) solution, with automated backup processes that it says frees up time for techs to focus on high-margin activities.  

“This is really about making sure that the technician experience is world class,” said Voccola. “It’s all about how do we enable a technician through automation and ease of use to be able to support more revenue. This is going to be a doozy there.”

Nathan Hable, NOC manager at BlueRock Technologies, told Channel Futures that the updated VSA lets him integrate his chosen vendors like Warranty Master and Webroot into Kaseya’s Technology Alliance Partners (TAP) platform. Even vendors that may not have a direct reseller agreement with Kaseya can design plugins through the TAP API so their products can be managed through VSA.

Hable says that Kaseya’s release of TAP integration competencies “sets the stage” for MSPs to be able to manage multiple products through a single pane of glass, a critical component for service providers’ growth.

VSA 9.5 also supports native remote Microsoft PowerShell scripting capabilities in Kaseya’s Live Connect helpdesk and enhanced file management that enables technicians to remotely upload or download multiple files and whole directories from a single interface.

Who Will Dominate the Market in 2018?

The RMM and PSA market is a crowded one, with a lot of consolidation and new competition causing fluid power dynamics with software providers that are geared toward the MSP market. Voccola says that the providers with a robust platform and enough resources to devote to R&D will be the ones that survive.

“Whoever has a strong balance sheet and access to capital will thrive, and those that don’t will struggle because the world changes relatively quickly, and the ability to make pivots requires big financial investments,” he says. “That flexibility is what MSPs demand. You’ve seen that with Kaseya, you’ve seen it with Datto and Autotask, and also with SolarWinds.”

Hable and BlueRock are betting that Kaseya, which is floating rumors of at least two big acquisitions this year, will be able to provide the cutting-edge technology the MSP needs to be two steps ahead of its competitors. Several years ago, BlueRock made an adjustment to dedicate resources to build out its NOC with more granular use of Kaseya’s monitoring and alerting capabilities. It also increasingly leveraged Kaseya’s Agent Procedures to automate tasks such as application deployment and proactive maintenance on its endpoints.  

“This initiative completely changed our service capability,” said Hable. “The load on our service desk dropped dramatically, and the number of preventable incidents that they have to address is now near zero.”

As for Voccola, he’s confident in Kaseya’s ability to keep its place among the industry leaders, in large part because it has the resources needed to throw at acquiring or developing new technology.

“I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant–I don’t mean it that way. But we’re clearly the market leader and the best RMM platform in the market by a long shot,” he says. “We take a lot of pride in that because we invest a ridiculous amount of money in it. With the amount of money we invest in it, we’d better be. Otherwise, I’ll be fired.”