In the latest of an ongoing string of acquisitions aimed at constructing the managed services world’s most comprehensive line-of-business platform, Kaseya Ltd. has acquired cloud-to-cloud backup vendor Spanning Cloud Apps LLC.
Terms of the deal, which Kaseya announced nearly six months after introducing a backup solution for Microsoft’s Office 365 suite based on Spanning technology, were not disclosed. Kaseya, which maintains dual headquarters in New York and Miami, plans to operate Spanning as an independent business unit under its current brand and with its own management team and partner program.
Founded eight years ago and headquartered in Austin, Texas, Spanning makes cloud-to-cloud backup solutions not only for Office 365 but for Salesforce and Google G Suite as well. Those are the three most popular software-as-a-service applications in the world, according to Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola.
“We now have a comprehensive backup solution for all of them,” he says.
At present, Spanning has over 10,000 MSP and corporate IT customers worldwide. Those organizations used Spanning solutions to protect more than 110 billion items last year.
Named Kaseya Office 365 Backup, the Spanning-based solution that Kaseya launched earlier this year is a directly embedded component of Kaseya’s VSA remote monitoring and management platform, as opposed to a separate system with integrated functionality.
“Integrations are good and integration is a good level of product interoperability, [but] when something is built into another product, it’s a much more advanced, a much more comprehensive, a much more complete level of interoperability,” Voccola says.
It also enables greater operational efficiency by sparing technicians from having to use or learn multiple interfaces, he continues. Kaseya’s IT Complete platform, which already included direct-to-cloud and appliance-based business continuity/disaster recovery components before the introduction of Kaseya Office 365 Backup, provides “single pane of glass” control over all of those systems.
According to Voccola, delivering cloud-to-cloud Office 365 backup offers MSPs a way to deepen relationships with their clients while replacing some of the revenue they used to collect installing and supporting on-premises Microsoft Exchange environments back before Office 365 reached market.
“That financial loss is pretty substantial,” Voccola observes. “Now an MSP can provide a much needed, value-added service for an Office 365 environment, which most of their customers have, so now they’re back in the game.”
At present, Kaseya has no plans to build backup functionality for Salesforce or G Suite into VSA. “Our MSPs are predominately Office 365 customers,” Voccola says. “Very few of them are leveraging Salesforce.”
That said, Spanning will continue to sell, support, and update the Salesforce backup solution that thousands of its customers use today. “Our Salesforce backup business is a huge business, and it will continue to be a huge business,” Voccola says, adding that Kaseya remains equally committed to Spanning’s G Suite backup product.
The biggest changes Spanning customers who don’t use Kaseya’s IT management solutions will see going forward, according to Voccola, are “much more favorable commercial terms” made possible by Kaseya’s cash-rich balance sheet. Those could potentially include bundled packaging, bundled pricing, and subscription-based payment terms like those enjoyed by MSPs, he adds, without providing further specifics.
Kaseya merged with BDR vendor Unitrends Inc. in May and acquired security assessment and compliance vendor RapidFire Tools Inc. last month. Both of those companies continue to operate as independent business units, just as Spanning will. Voccola cites personal experience as the founder of businesses later acquired by BMC Software Inc. and CA Technologies as the inspiration for those arrangements.
“I’ve seen first-hand, throughout my entire career, incredibly innovative, single-product, single-focused companies that I’ve started, run, and owned get destroyed by big companies, because the big company gobbles it up and tries to fold it in and doesn’t allow it to still continue to keep its innovative spirit, its innovative culture, its innovative identity,” he says. Kaseya, Voccola insists, will not make the same mistake.
“We’re not doing it because we’re nice guys, or gals. We’re doing it because we are very selfish, and we want our company to be as valuable as it can,” Voccola says. “I’ve seen too many good companies kind of lose their edge, and that’s not the strategy that we have.”
Voccola hinted at the RapidFire Tools and Spanning acquisitions in an interview with ChannelPro two months ago. Two further purchases will be coming within the next few months, he said in that same conversation. All of those transactions fit within a larger ambition to turn Kaseya into the single-source provider of choice for its MSP customers.
“Our goal is to have an MSP be able to use software from Kaseya to deliver every single managed service requirement that their customer wants, and do it from a single pane of glass,” Voccola says.
Datto Inc. and SolarWinds MSP are similarly assembling expansive solution portfolios for MSPs.
