Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Fred Voccola, CEO of Kaseya (Part 6)

Fred Voccola: It’s important for MSPs and companies like Kaseya that provide the platform for MSPs to be constantly looking at the platform that they’re operating on and making sure that the managed services they offer are delivering the value that these capabilities can have. Let’s talk about cloud. Office365 is a SaaS application that has fundamentally changed the MSP market.

If you go back seven years ago, even three years ago, the typical small business would have an on-premise server of Microsoft Exchange. It’ll be one of the most critical applications in their business. Here comes Office365. It’s delivered in the cloud. There’s no longer a server. Why does that office need a managed service provider? The managed service providers that survived and thrived were forward-looking.

They said, “The cloud and SaaS is coming. I can either try to battle Microsoft and lose, or I can do what’s right by my client and I can embrace it.” When someone uses Office365, there’s a different set of challenges from an on-premise Exchange server. There’re different challenges for the customer such as provisioning, license management, back up of your Office365 instance on a different SaaS environment, security of the endpoint that’s accessing that device, single sign-on and two-factor authentication.

These were things that, five years ago, no one thought about at a dental practice. Now, they’re required. If the MSP doesn’t continuously look at the new challenges that will be posed by the new technology innovation and how to fix them, they will go away. A new and more innovative MSP will take its place. The example I gave of Office365 is just one example. I don’t know the exact numbers.

The proliferation of Office365 is the fastest-growing SaaS application in the shortest time. Everybody went to it. Think about it. It hindered and scared MSPs who didn’t adapt and adjust. If my email is not working, am I going to call Microsoft? No, I’m going to call my MSP. My email might not be working because my PC hasn’t been patched or who knows what the problem is.

Sramana Mitra: There is going to be a lot more complexity coming into that. There’s the vertical element. When you talk about AI; for example, AI is not purely horizontal. If you’re running an auto body shop, the AI that you need to implement is different from the AI for the dental office.

There’s going to be domain-specific stuff going on. How do you deal with that? Is that something that’s going to be dealt with at your level where you provide vertical-specific platforms to different MSPs who specialize in those categories?

Fred Voccola: I would take it a step further. Take the auto body shop. The auto body shop owner doesn’t know anything about technology. She doesn’t even know how big data and AI can help her so she’s going to ask her MSP. If the MSP doesn’t have an answer, she’s going to ask another MSP.

As it applies to Kaseya, this is a dream come true for us. One of the features of our platform is that we manage endpoints. An endpoint is a laptop, a server, a router, a printer, or a refrigerator. Let’s use a laptop. What does it mean to manage a laptop? It means that you have to secure it. It means that you have to make sure that it’s patched properly. You have to make sure that it’s two-factor authenticated. You got to make sure that it’s backed up.

There’re a million ways of managing that. We manage about 30 million endpoints around the world. When we take a look at our product, one of the things that we have built and are continuing to build is taking a look at all of the metadata of all of those 30 million machines. We see patterns of what works and what doesn’t.

We build automation into our product. It automates proactive solutions to things before they break. Our MSPs just turn it on and let it run. The data that we capture about the usage of IT infrastructure is put into our AI engine and then pushes out suggesting remediations so that nothing breaks.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Fred Voccola, CEO of Kaseya
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