Kaseya has unveiled AI-based automation functionality for its integrated suite of RMM, PSA, backup, and other solutions.
The managed services software leader announced the forthcoming enhancement during its DattoCon partner conference in Miami. It is set to roll out in this year’s final quarter. Kaseya also introduced a new flexible payment plan for its backup solutions and a new PCI compliance offering.
Meet Cooper Bots
Available at no extra charge to Kaseya partners, the new Cooper Bots no-code automation service will draw on artificial intelligence to handle rote tasks like onboarding new users and rotating passwords. This way, technicians don’t have to spend time on these tasks.
“Cooper Bots are fully fledged cross-functional business process automation bots that go beyond just suggesting things to do,” said Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola during a keynote presentation. “They do things for you if you want them to.”
The result can be significant productivity improvements, according to Ranjan Singh, Kaseya chief product officer. “It’s still early, but I would say you’d gain at least 20% efficiency,” he said during a conversation with ChannelPro.
MSPs can opt in or out of the various Cooper Bots that will eventually be available for everything from Kaseya’s RMM and PSA solutions to its KaseyaOne partner portal.
Building on AI-based Automation Offerings
The new functionality builds on the foundation Kaseya laid last June at its Connect IT event when it introduced the Cooper Intelligence Engine, an AI-powered service designed to point out product functionality that users are paying for but not benefitting from.
Pia and Rewst are leading names within a young cohort of vendors offering AI-based automation solutions for MSPs similar to Cooper Bots. According to Singh, however, those companies offer robotic process automation solutions. Meanwhile, Cooper Bots perform business process automation, he explained.
“We’re not saying, ‘Click here, click here, click here. You’re going to take all these steps.’ We say, ‘We know exactly what you want to do, we’ve built the integrations. Now, we are giving you an engine to just orchestrate those actions.'”
For his part, Rewst Chief Revenue Officer Charlie Tomeo noted that Cooper Bots automate Kaseya products only — not third-party solutions — during activities like provisioning new end users.
“If you ever do something outside of that, you’re not going to be able to do that part of the onboarding process,” he said. “That’s going to be a challenge.”
Future Cooper Bots will automate a variety of common tasks in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure, per Singh. Even further down the product roadmap, updates will integrate Cooper Bots with the Microsoft 365 Copilot AI service so technicians can do parts of their job from directly inside Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications.
“This is the opposite of bringing Microsoft into IT Complete,” Singh said. “This is taking information from IT Complete and making it available in the Microsoft ecosystem so that technicians can action things there.”
Cooper is the name of Voccola’s dog, and an inspiration for a range of Kaseya initiatives beyond product names.
Reduce Risk
The new payment option for Kaseya’s unified backup product family, called FLEXspend for Backup, will allow MSPs to shift previously made spending commitments among on-premises and cloud-based BDR solutions from its Datto, Spanning, and Unitrends business units. According to Voccola, FLEXspend will reduce the risk MSPs take on when buying backup products amidst rapid adoption of cloud solutions by enabling them to reallocate those dollars as and when needed.
“You guys are sitting in a situation where things aren’t static and consistent, and it makes it really hard to make financial investments and financial commitments,” Voccola said in his keynote. “We want to provide you the ability to move your investment among our backup portfolio as your customers are moving and as your demands change.”
Kaseya’s newly announced automated compliance service, Secure Payments, is designed to confirm that end users in the retail industry and other verticals are meeting security requirements defined in the PCI standard. “If your customer is not PCI compliant, we will take the steps to make them PCI compliant, and we provide you the visibility to demonstrate that to your customers,” Voccola explained.
Secure Payments builds on technology Kaseya acquired through payments vendor ConnectBooster last year. According to Kaseya, 73% of SMBs who accept online payments aren’t PCI compliant, and 91% of those companies believe their MSP is responsible for keeping them compliant.
Unified RMM Strategy
Voccola and Singh discussed Kaseya’s evolving strategy for helping MSPs administer an expanding array of endpoints. That now includes SaaS applications, cloud infrastructure solutions, IoT devices, and networking gear in addition to traditional desktops, laptops, and servers.
Recent steps in that process include the addition of Microsoft 365 management to Datto RMM. Longer term, both that product and Kaseya’s VSA platform will provide comprehensive support for all of an MSP’s managed endpoints.
“Our strategy is what we call unified RMM,” said Voccola during his keynote. “Every type of endpoint [will be] covered in our RMM solutions, whether it’s a Mac, network management products, industrial IOT devices, servers up in Azure, Amazon, Rackspace — whatever it may be.”
Kaseya outlined these and other aspirations during a VSA version 10 preview at last year’s Connect IT event. Most of that vision — including mobile device, IoT, and network device management — is now in place, according to Singh. The rest should arrive by the end of the year.
“The only thing I would say that’s outstanding in VSA 10 in terms of endpoint coverage is probably cloud,” Singh shared. “That is going to probably come in December.”
What’s Next
Coming to Datto RMM by end of year as well, said Singh during his keynote, is advanced software management functionality for third-party cloud applications, including Box, Dropbox, Evernote, and Slack.
Augmentt, Nerdio, SkyKick, and other vendors are all part of a growing crop of cloud management specialists.
DattoCon 2023 concludes tomorrow. According to Voccola, Kaseya will host DattoCon events, contrary to fears among Datto partners last year following Kaseya’s blockbuster $6.2 billion acquisition of Datto, “now and forever.”
