GDP forecasts for 2023, while somewhat less dire than before, remain gloomy. Kaseya sees tough times ahead too.
“We’re assuming a really bad 24-month macroeconomic environment,” says Fred Voccola, the managed services vendor’s CEO. “It’s going to be tough. It’s going to be a grind.”
That said, he continues, while the economy is likely to get ugly in the months ahead, “it’ll get less ugly for people who serve MSPs than it will for everybody else.”
And that, he adds, very much includes Kaseya. “We think that we’re going to be growing mid-thirties organically,” Voccola says, with EBITDA growth approaching 40%. As a result, rather than making cuts in anticipation of a difficult market, Kaseya plans to continue spending substantial sums on its products and partners.
“We’re making literally billions of dollars of investments in the MSP space,” Voccola says.
That’s in stark contrast to Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, Meta, and a succession of other tech industry heavyweights that have announced sizeable layoffs in recent weeks. Some of those companies, according to Voccola, expanded too far, too fast based on a mistaken set of assumptions. “A lot of people thought near zero interest rates are normal,” he says. “They grossly overextended their operational reach, so they’re clawing back.”
More importantly though, in Voccola’s view, many of the vendors making staff cuts this year earn their big money from big businesses already well down the road toward digital transformation.
“They’re going to scale back their spend on tech and tech-related services pretty substantially,” he predicts. SMBs, on the other hand, will lean into automation even harder in a recession-inspired bid to do more and spend less.
“They need that to be competitive in a tough economic environment,” explains Voccola, who consequently—and like many other industry observers—foresees a better year ahead, relatively speaking, for MSPs and the vendors who serve them.
“We at Kaseya are fortunate that our customers are materially less impacted by macroeconomic conditions than the customers of enterprise-facing vendors,” he says.
Kaseya plans to pour some of that good fortune into a series of still confidential ventures to be disclosed in the next few months.
“There’s some big things coming,” Voccola says. And in a departure from the big things Kaseya unveiled last year, these next ones don’t involve acquisitions.
“We’re not buying someone. We’re not going public. We’re not selling,” Voccola says. Instead, he hints, at least one of the forthcoming announcements, due in a matter of weeks, will be directed in some manner at end users.
“They will know Kaseya, they will know MSPs, and they will all want to have their IT and security managed by a Kaseya MSP,” Voccola predicts.
Other spending targets for the year include the new partner program Kaseya introduced two weeks ago, the more than 80 local events the company plans to host, and the four big conferences it will hold this year, which will be officially named Kaseya Connect Global, Kaseya DattoCon, Kaseya DattoCon Europe, and Kaseya DattoCon APAC.
Three of those names, significantly, include “DattoCon,” and two—Kaseya Connect Global in April and Kaseya DattoCon in October—are large, expensive North American conferences that some Datto partners feared might be combined into a single Kaseya event going forward. That they both remain on the event calendar instead, Voccola says, is evidence that Kaseya has kept the promises it made last year after buying Datto to spend more on the company and its partners rather than less.
“We’ve done everything we said we’d do,” he insists. “Doesn’t mean that we haven’t made 18,000 mistakes, but we’ve done everything we said we’d do.”
