Kaseya has acquired audIT, a maker of automated sales presentation software for MSPs.
The managed services vendor announced both that deal and the purchase of automated penetration testing vendor Vonahi Security at the Kaseya Connect Global conference in Las Vegas this morning.
According to Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola, audIT’s solution will help Kaseya partners enhance a critical business process that few do well.
“I’m saying that in a loving way and not in a derogatory way,” said Voccola today in a conversation with ChannelPro. “MSPs are great technicians. They’re not necessarily great salespeople.”
They’re also prone to confusing would-be clients in sales meetings with technical jargon, and to structuring meetings around a line-itemed sales proposal, according to Frank DeBenedetto, audIT’s founding partner and CEO.
“You put it in front of a prospect or a client and their eyes glaze over,” DeBenedetto says. “They don’t understand what they’re looking at and you force them to buy based on price.”
audIT’s solution is designed to spare MSPs that fate by automating the preparation of compelling, repeatable sales presentations that end users without technical know-how can easily comprehend.
“It just makes it easier for us to do our job and to sell,” says DeBenedetto, who in addition to running audIT is a successful New Jersey-based MSP himself.
Kaseya partners have immediate access through the KaseyaOne portal to five audIT licenses free of charge. Existing audIT users have been granted five incremental free seats too, and newcomers to both Kaseya and audit can now download five licenses at no charge as well.
“We’re offering a freemium model now,” DeBenedetto says. “We couldn’t do this without Kaseya.”
audIT shipped a new release of its software today in conjunction with the acquisition announcement featuring a revised interface that shares the same look and feel as other Kaseya products. A wide range of further updates are set to begin arriving within the next 30 days.
“You’re going to see some really deep integrations with a lot of the Kaseya stack,” DeBenedetto says, citing links to Kaseya’s IT Glue documentation platform as an example.
“There’s a lot of asset information in there,” he notes, that audIT will soon import for presentation-building purposes automatically.
Further, more sophisticated, automations are due to arrive in the next few years, DeBenedetto adds. “What we’re working towards is more AI-based interpretation of the data, where we can gather a certain amount of information and put it in the system and have it just tell you your score and color [code] it for you.”
audIT will continue to support existing integrations with non-Kaseya products, and add more such third-party integrations in the future, he continues.
DeBenedetto will remain part of the Kaseya team as the newly appointed general manager of what’s set to become a larger MSP sales automation suite. “audIT will be part of it, and then we’re building and we’ll likely acquire other components to that,” he says.
audIT and Vonahi, the pen testing vendor Kaseya has also purchased, are the latest additions to Kaseya’s expansive family of brands, which includes Connect Booster, Datto, ID Agent, IT Glue, RapidFire Tools, and other familiar names. According to Voccola, keeping what Kaseya calls its IT Complete platform genuinely complete requires it to buy or build new functionality in response to industry trends.
“Being complete means staying complete,” Voccola said during his keynote this morning. “We are not a very effective platform if we don’t meet the majority, if not all, of your needs in our functionality.”
Kaseya unveiled a new streamlined cyberinsurance program, a technician training program, and an ambitious branding initiative during the Connect Global conference today as well.
