Kaseya has launched an initiative aimed at increasing awareness and adoption of the integrated IT Complete platform it’s built through vendor acquisitions in recent years.
Specific steps associated with that effort include a branding campaign designed to popularize IT Complete’s name and value proposition, the creation of new cross-platform partner enablement and business development groups, and some $14 million of spending on enhanced IT Complete integrations, according to Matt Solomon, Kaseya’s vice president of business development and IT Complete, in a conversation last week at ChannelPro‘s SMB Forum event in Dallas.
A pioneer in RMM software, Kaseya acquired identity and access management vendor Scorpion Software in 2014, PSA vendor Vorex in 2016, and cloud management vendor Unigma in 2017 before initiating an acquisition tear in 2018 that included BDR vendor Unitrends, compliance and security vendor RapidFire Tools, cloud-to-cloud backup vendor Spanning, documentation vendor IT Glue, and dark web monitoring vendor ID Agent.
Though many of those companies continue to operate under their original name as Kaseya business units, their products are also components of IT Complete, Kaseya’s integrated suite of solutions for managed service providers. Solomon, who was previously vice president of business development for ID Agent, is now on point for building interest in the IT Complete brand and driving demand for IT Complete products. His presentation at ChannelPro‘s conference last week was among the first of what will be many speaking appearances by him and others about IT Complete this year.
“It’s actually shocking to me how many MSPs still don’t know that IT Glue or ID Agent is part of the Kaseya family,” he says. “Part of my mission I’m being tasked with is getting the word out.”
According to Solomon, it’s no accident that Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola chose an ID Agent veteran for that assignment, or that fellow ID Agent alum Dan Tomaszewski has been named vice president in charge of Kaseya’s Powered Services partner enablement group. “One of the big reasons Kaseya acquired ID Agent, other than the fact that we really had an incredible trajectory over the [prior] two years, was our partner program,” he says. “Myself and Dan have really been tasked with bringing all of these different communities that each one of these business units had and really creating the IT Complete community.”
Expanding programs originally developed for ID Agent partners is a big component of Kaseya’s plan for realizing that goal. For example, extending Goal Assist, the “white glove” sales support offering ID Agent launched last January, to all Kaseya partners is among Solomon’s top priorities for 2020. MSPs who take advantage of that offer will receive about five hours a year of sales training and go-to-market planning advice from a dedicated expert.
“Think of it as everybody gets a channel success manager,” says Solomon, adding that Goal Assist consultants provide direct sales support as well. “We’re actually getting on phone calls to help close deals for partners,” he notes. “I personally closed a $15,000 enterprise deal for a partner, and he wasn’t even on the call.”
Tomaszewski, meanwhile, is now turning the partner enablement program he spearheaded at ID Agent into a resource for all IT Complete users. Renamed Powered Services last May, that program provides a wide range of service launch guides, sales and marketing playbooks, white-label presentations, email templates, and more.
“Dan has an entire staff now dedicated to just this,” Solomon says. “They’re constantly putting out more content, working with each business unit.” Indeed, Kaseya published 25 new pieces of Powered Services content for RapidFire Tools, Unitrends, and ID Agent products, plus the Kaseya Compliance Manager solution, last week alone.
Tomaszewski’s organization is also responsible for Kaseya’s recently launched IT Complete partner portal. “If you have licenses under five different business units, all of that information, all of those sales enablement materials, are all in there for you,” Solomon says.
Convincing partners who currently use systems from one or two of those business units to use more is an ongoing objective for Kaseya. According to Solomon, the company views that as a long-term effort likely to involve a series of incremental purchasing decisions by MSPs rather than wholesale adoption of everything IT Complete offers.
“We want to take you along the journey,” he says. “You’re a three-person MSP today, but next year you could be a 10-person MSP and a lot of these other things could start to make sense as you scale with us.”
Kaseya is investing heavily in measures designed to make adoption IT Complete products attractive, including price breaks. “Because Kaseya owns all the different business units, they can definitely be very aggressive in terms of the pricing model,” Solomon notes.
The company is also pushing hard to drive more and deeper integration among IT Complete solutions in a bid to make the productivity advantages of using all those systems irresistible to MSPs. Kaseya refers to the source code-level connections within its suite as “workflow integrations,” to distinguish them from the API-based “cosmetic integrations” it maintains with products from other vendors.
“What Kaseya has done is they’ve taken each business unit and said, ‘You have to give 20% of your research and development funds towards IT Complete workflow integrations.'” Solomon says. “We’re talking upwards of $14 million being invested this year in just workflow integrations, which only benefits the MSP.”
Examples of new integrations coming soon, according to Solomon, include one that will feed data from ID Agent about compromised Office 365 credentials directly into Spanning’s backup solution and another that will import status information from Kaseya Compliance Manager directly into the Kaseya VSA remote monitoring and management platform.
There are many further integrations to come after that, too. “There’s a spreadsheet that I’ve seen with a list of over a hundred of them that are being worked on,” Solomon says, adding that partners can expect about six to eight of the items on that list to reach market every quarter.
The future is less clear, he adds, with respect to how Kaseya’s individual business unit names fit within the company’s overall brand strategy.
“We’re still tinkering with what that ultimately looks like,” Solomon says.
