Managed services software maker Kaseya Ltd. has unveiled a forthcoming cloud-to-cloud backup solution for data in Microsoft’s Office 365 collaboration and productivity offering.
Called Kaseya Office 365 Backup, the new addition to Kaseya’s IT Complete platform is based on technology from cloud-to-cloud backup specialist Spanning Cloud Apps LLC, of Austin, Texas, and will become available in the second half of the year. Kaseya, which has dual headquarters in Miami and New York, will both sell and support the system itself.
“It’ll all be on a single invoice with whatever else they’re partnering with us on,” says Frank Tisellano Jr., Kaseya’s vice president for product management and design. “We find that makes it really straightforward for them to just have a single vendor and not have to worry about eight different support accounts and eight different customer success representatives to call.”
Pricing, which has yet to be announced, will be levied on a per user per month basis with annual contracts. There will be no extra charges for storage or add-on functionality, Tisellano says.
The new system integrates closely with Kaseya’s VSA remote monitoring and management solution, allowing technicians to provision new accounts, schedule backups, check backup status, restore data, and more from within the VSA interface.
“Everything that you can do in the Spanning portal is embedded natively in VSA,” Tisellano says.
Integration with Kaseya’s Business Management Solution PSA product enables the new solution to record backup-related alerts and create backup-related service tickets in that system automatically.
According to Tisellano, cloud-to-cloud backup is a rich potential source of replacement income for MSPs who used to support onsite Microsoft Exchange email servers.
“[This] can mean substantial additional recurring revenue for them,” he notes. Kaseya says that fully 87 percent of its MSP customers currently provide Office 365 services to their clients.
Kaseya Office 365 Backup protects mailboxes, contacts, and calendars, as well as data in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. Backups happen once a day. When necessary, users can restore entire accounts, specific folders within accounts, or individual messages and files within folders.
Kaseya and Spanning have architected the system for maximum ease of implementation and use. There is no software to install at the client site or MSP’s office and all of the functionality is browser-based. Administrators can configure backups from inside VSA with a single click.
“You press basically one button, and you’re backing up,” Tisellano says.
Today’s announcement marks the third time in just over a month that Kaseya has augmented the capabilities of IT Complete by partnering with a third-party vendor rather than buying or building a solution. Early in March, the company revealed plans to add an appliance-based business continuity and disaster recovery solution based on technology from Unitrends MSP, a subsidiary of Burlington, Mass.-based Unitrends Inc. that makes BDR solutions for managed service providers. Two weeks later, Kaseya announced a deal to integrate documentation software from IT Glue with its managed services suite.
Though both of those agreements involve source code-level collaboration, Tisellano characterizes Kaseya’s relationship with Spanning as “a pretty standard OEM partnership” by contrast.
“It’s not the same kind of relationship that we have with Unitrends,” he says, in which source code was placed in escrow for eight years in both Europe and the U.S.
Tisellano declined to say whether or not Kaseya plans to expand its cloud-to-cloud backup capabilities beyond Office 365.
“We absolutely recognize how critical SaaS application management is becoming, both in the enterprise and for MSPs, and we are really, really focused on making the experience of doing the management of SaaS applications as easy as or easier than doing management of endpoints and networks,” he says.
A hint about the company’s future plans, however, may lurk within Tisellano’s explanation for why Kaseya chose to partner with Spanning rather than another cloud-to-cloud backup vendor.
“We wanted a partner that we could have a long-term relationship with, that not only has best-in-class technology in the applications that our customers care about backing up today but that also has the knowledge and the chops to be able to expand that platform going forward, and who can grow with us, and who we can grow with,” he says.
Tisellano also cited Spanning’s solutions for backing up Google’s G Suite and Salesforce’s CRM solution as contributing factors in Kaseya’s partnership with the firm.
