Kaseya Accelerating Managed Services Evolution

New Kaseya CEO Yogesh Gupta

New Kaseya CEO Yogesh Gupta

Kaseya, under the leadership of new chief executive Yogesh Gupta, is on the move, literally. The managed services and IT automation company is pulling up stakes from its California base and official headquarters in Switzerland and moving Boston, where the new and evolving management team will oversee global operations and product development.

Moving the headquarters isn’t the most significant move Gupta has made in his two month tenure. Since joining the company with the acquisition by Insight Venture Partners, Gupta has closed two acquisitions – Zyrion and Rover Apps, installed a new executive team, started realigning the company’s focus to expand in SMB and midmarket segments, and building the foundation for future channel expansion.

“Kaseya has the opportunity to be the provider of management services. I want Kaseya to be the IT management platform for SMBs and midmarket companies around the world,” Gupta said in an interview with Channelnomics.

Questions abound for just where Gupta and his management team will take Kaseya. When the company was acquired in June as part of the consolidation of remote monitoring and management (RMM) vendors, many channel observers concluded that Kaseya would exit managed services and focus on enterprise IT automation.

Gupta, a former CA Technologies executive and key player in the development of CA’s Unicenter management platform, may have reinforced those initial perceptions by appoint Loren Weinberg Jarret, a former Oracle and America Express executive, as chief marketing officer; Brian Murphy, a former NetSuite executive, to chief sales officer; and Prakash Khot, a former Salesforce.com executive, as chief technology officer and head of engineering.

Exiting managed services or the SMB and midmarket segment is not on Gupta’s roadmap. He tells Channelnomics the opportunity in front of Kaseya is developing services and systems that allow businesses around the world to take full advantage of the technologies such as cloud computing, mobile devices and social communications that will help them operate better.

“The poor IT manager is stuck with having to manage all this infrastructure without stepping on people’s BYOD desires,” Gupta said.

“With a significant technology shift where there’s an opportunity to manage and secure infrastructure, that’s the opportunity I’m interested in,” he added. “The problem is huge and the opportunity is huge.”

As a private company, Kaseya doesn’t disclose its financial performance or specifics about its revenue sources. However, Gupta revealed that Kaseya earns two-thirds of its revenue through the sale of tools to managed service providers; the remaining one-third is from direct sales of its IT automation software to midmarket and enterprise accounts. Any notion of abandoning or scaling back Kaseya’s existing managed services business is unfounded, he says.

“We recognize that SMB is the opportunity, as they do not have the resources to manage IT and they need the support of managed service providers,” says Gupta, who counts the global MSP total addressable market in the tens of millions of small businesses.

The Kaseya roadmap is clear, he says; it’s about building out capabilities to make IT management simpler, scalable and secure. The addition of Zyrion is giving Kaseya expanded capabilities in monitoring and managing cloud computing assets. Rover Apps will expand Kaseya’s ability to monitor and manage mobile devices. While Gupta has no plans to de-emphasize the managed service segment, he does see opportunity in building out on-premises software packages.

A change Gupta could make is expanding Kaseya sales by creating a reseller channel. Kaseya has long rankled its partners by selling RMM tools to managed service providers while selling similar tools direct to midmarket and enterprise accounts. Gupta sees room for creating an indirect sales model, in which partners would resell and support Kaseya’s automation tools.

But why the speed? Gupta says it’s simple: He’s unencumbered by integration issues. Unlike competitors N-able, which was bought by SolarWinds, and Level Platforms, acquired by AVG Technologies, Kaseya – even under new ownership – is still the same company. Executing changes at lightning speed is not just about staying ahead of the competition, but building for all the opportunities ahead.