30 01732 759725 MSPS Fred Voccola, CEO of Kaseya, tells Technology Reseller why we’re on the cusp of a golden age for MSPs powered by Kaseya expertise (see box). “As companies become more dependent on the applications that allow them to exist, as they become more reliant on technology and spend more on technology, bad people are going to go after them more and more because they know if they catch them out they will pay more for a ransom or some other way to keep their technology going. So attacks are going to increase. A 24-person company cannot afford to hire five IT and security people to strengthen its defences, so they're going to continue to do it with MSPs. That is the fundamental trend, and that trend will not change for a minimum of 10 or 15 years, if ever.” Technology-first businesses Earlier in the day, at a Kaseya+Datto Connect Local event in London, attended by around 170 MSPs, Voccola explained that the MSP customer base of small and mid-sized businesses was expanding, pointing out that SMBs with fewer than 2,000 employees were the largest and fastest growing part of global GDP. “We think in the next 24 to 48 months that's going to continue to grow. Almost 70% of new jobs will be created by your customers and people like your customers,” he said. At the same time, SMBs are transforming themselves into technologyfirst companies, with nine out of 10 small businesses expecting to spend a larger percentage of their revenue on technology. “In the early ‘90s, we saw the Fortune 5000 companies and governments go through the same kind of digital transformation, with ERP, e-commerce, supply chain management. Those applications changed how enterprises function. We’re now seeing the same thing happen to your customers.” Voccola adds that this transformation is fundamentally changing the relationship SMEs have with technology. “In 2015, we asked small to midsize businesses if they were dependent on their technology and about half said they were, saying they needed applications to be ‘mostly available’ and ‘mostly secure’. We asked that same question last year and 93% said they are dependent on technology and now need applications to be ‘always available’ and ‘always secure’. “The job of an MSP is to make sure that the business applications that these organisations leverage are always available and always secure. That's why this industry has been exploding for the last decade. And it will continue to explode for the next decade, because that digital transformation is only about one third of the way through.” A single platform So, what about all those irritants? How are they compatible with a golden age for MSPs? That’s where the Kaseya IT Complete platform comes in. With 40 modules and more than 1,300 integrations, this aims to give MSPs everything they need to run their business and deliver every type of managed service, all in one place with a high degree of automation and integration. The argument goes that having just one platform from one vendor has the potential to alleviate four key challenges facing MSPs – vendor fatigue, limited integration, poor utilisation of features and high costs. IT Complete enables MSPs to reduce the number of vendors they have to deal with, as well as the number of tools their ‘multifunction technicians’ rely on to meet customer requirements – as many as 17 in the average MSP. Because Kaseya modules are tightly integrated, they provide more effective automation, for enhanced productivity and accuracy. In addition, Kaseya’s pricing policy is designed to make it 30% to 50% cheaper for MSPs to add new services from the IT Complete stack. Voccola says this is important because customers tend to underestimate the cost of making an application ‘always available’ and ‘always secure’, which he puts at three or four times the cost of the application itself – rather than 40% of the cost, which is what he says non-technical customers typically expect to pay. Fred Voccola, CEO of Kaseya, a provider of unified IT management and security software for managed service providers, says MSPs are living through a golden age – and then lists a multitude of irritants that they have to contend with daily. These range from the hassle of managing multiple supplier relationships to tight-fisted customers who are slow to spend but quick to complain to the inefficiencies of poorly integrated products and patchy automation. With so many aggravations to contend with, can this really be a golden age? Voccola believes it is for two reasons. “One is that a larger percentage of the global economy is made up of small to midsize businesses, and that trend is going to continue for the foreseeable future. The other is that small to midsize businesses are becoming more and more dependent on technology to allow them to be competitive, and they need that technology to be always available.” These two trends, he suggests, are driving demand for technology and managed services and fuelling average MSP growth of 12.5% – or 16% for Kaseya customers – compared to global growth of 2.5% to 3%. To illustrate the point, Voccola cites the growing demand for cybersecurity A golden age for MSPs Fred Voccola
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