THE MSP SERVICE DELIVERY MODEL is transforming, and Jim Lippie (pictured) wants to empower partners to win on the transition. By providing the tools to protect and add value around SaaS applications, “”we feel like we’re solving a big problem for MSPs,”” says the CEO of startup cybersecurity company SaaS Alerts.
Launched as a beta in August 2020 and generally available in January 2021, SaaS Alerts discovers abnormal user behavior and potential data loss, unifies security notifications and alerts residing in multiple SaaS applications, and delivers that information along with remediation recommendations as a ticket in a PSA. SaaS Alerts currently monitors 35 different events across four SaaS applications: Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox, and Salesforce; Slack and Zoom will be added within the next 60 days, Lippie says.
The roadmap includes an application wizard coming in Q4 that will allow MSPs to add any third-party SaaS application to the platform.
Cost is 50 cents per user, per month, with free internal usage for MSP partners and no long-term agreement. Lippie says SaaS Alerts has added 100 MSP partners since January with about 15,000 users; he expects that to rise to 50,000 users this month.
Partners are going to market two ways, Lippie explains: incorporating the alerting tool into an existing service bundle as a value add, or charging the customer an additional increment.
Lippie, a former Kaseya executive and MSP who joined the company in January, says launching during the pandemic proved to be good timing, as remote work exacerbated the challenge of protecting SaaS applications. “”It was needed before, and this was the way things are going, but COVID really accelerated [the need] dramatically,”” he says.
In March, SaaS Alerts closed a $1.2 million round of funding led by a group of MSP industry veterans. While Lippie says there are some enterprise-level products that have similar functionality, they are not multitenant, and that SaaS Alerts is currently the only one built for MSPs.
