Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Fred Voccola, CEO of Kaseya (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Yes, but that’s still infrastructure. I’m wondering how the application-level technology is going to make it out to the nodes.

Fred Voccola: That’s a very vertical question. If I’m an insurance broker, and I have 10 sales people in my office and two underwriters. I’m not only a broker but I’m also taking my own risks. If I’m looking at who my sales people should call, there’re AI-based applications that are targeting specific sales productivity functions in the B2B and the B2-VerticalB space.

Most managed service providers focus on vertical industries not because the infrastructure  is so unique but because it’s easier to go to market when you have a reputation within a certain community. If I’m focusing on insurance brokers, the most important thing for insurance brokers is the hit rate of calls to conversations and conversations to underwriting policies and policies that can be underwritten profitably so they can be sold.

If I’m the MSP, not only am I going to say to that insurance broker that they can run the network securely but also deliver the application in an embedded format on the infrastructure it’s running on. Most of those applications are cloud-based apps. If you draw an analogy to the 90’s, you and VARs putting together hardware and vertical applications onto a box and selling a box.

Today’s analogy is, “I’m not putting it in a box. I’m taking the cloud and I’ll provide you the infrastructure to access the cloud. I will secure it and back it up. I’m going to bring this specific cloud application to you in one package.” We’re starting to see that trend. That’s going to be super cool.

What that allows is all the enterprise applications SaaS guys could never access the SMB space because it’s too expensive. How do you build a sales force to sell $500 a year deals? It doesn’t make sense. If you’ve got 150,000 MSPs around the world, they will push it for you.

Sramana Mitra: In the case of Salesforce App Exchange, a lot of vertical vendors went to market through the App Exchange. Do you have an equivalent of that?

Fred Voccola: We do. It’s called our Automation Exchange. We have something we call Application Alliance Partner Program and a Technical Alliance Partner Program. The AAP is exactly what you’re describing. Let’s say Tanya started a niche PR SaaS application and she wants to reach MSPs to push it to small businesses. They will do that through the Kaseya community.

It’s a crowd-sourced open community that allows vendors to put their product in and they automatically integrate and automate within the Kaseya infrastructure. The vertical application providers are in the infant stage because most MSPs are still just mastering how to deliver compliance solutions to their customers. I think you’re going to see a big proliferation there. Look at how fast Office365 was adopted by the MSP community and rapidly distributed.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Fred Voccola, CEO of Kaseya
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