R9 manages BYOD, MDM and MAM, all for a dollar per user per month (or ten dollars per year), regardless of the number of devices

Remote management and monitoring software provider Kaseya has announced Release 9. For the first time, it offers a complete mobility management solution, and does so at what the company intends to be a disruptive price. The new release also features the launch of Kaseya’s new private cloud infrastructure.

“With Release 9, we keep to our commitment to have a new release every four months, which is unheard of in our industry,” said Yogesh Gupta, Kaseya’s president and CEO. “It contains two major things. First, we are delivering a complete Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution that manages all aspects of personal and company owned devices. Secondly, we are building a brand new underlying cloud infrastructure underneath our product, as we completely revamped it with several million dollars of investment last year. It changes the way the cloud platform performs and scales.” It has higher levels of security, performance and availability as well as multifactor authentication.

The EMM offering is what Gupta expects will really turn heads.

“It handles BYOD, Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application management (MAM) all in one product, not cobbled together, and is delivered at a very disruptive price,” Gupta said. “We will be charging a dollar a month or ten dollars a year per user, in an environment when many were asking $5-6 a month and have now cut this to $3-4 dollars. This comes with all the capabilities companies expect. It’s not a cheap product.” The price is the same per user, whether the person has one device being managed or ten.

“We think this will change the way of managing mobile solutions,” Gupta stressed. “We may be a little late in getting into this, but for this type of holistic solution, at this price, we are not late at all.”

Gupta said most of the products on the market originally came out of the MDM space, and focused on selling to larger enterprises, and integrating the personal devices of BYOD with this has been a big challenge.

“People have not come up with a single integrated solution,” he said. “Personal devices have more variety, and there was a tendency to see it as a different market from business device management. The emphasis in the enterprise devices was making it easy for IT to manage, as opposed to ease of use and onboarding for the end user.”

Kaseya’s offering, in contrast, started with a BYOD platform acquired with RoverApps in 2013, and built out from there.

“We leveraged the BYOD, which was a standalone product, and added MDM and MAM capabilities to it,” Gupta said.

“You need a fully integrated solution which can also manage mobile devices through a single pane of glass,” said Tom Hayes, Kaseya’s VP of Product Marketing. “Customers don’t want a one-off solution for mobile devices. This is a precursor to universal device management, and we are moving in that direction.”

The BYOD management uses encrypted containerized applications, to provide security at different levels, and has AES-256 encryption in addition to SSL to protect company data at rest as well as in flight. The on-boarding of devices uses Active Directory and is lightning fast.

While the management increases here are very significant, the pricing is what is likely to generate the most buzz, because it is so evidently disruptive,

“We think of this as forward pricing,” Hayes said. “We think to manage millions of devices, it has to get to the dollar a month level.”

For the MSPs, that’s great news, because since they pay that fee, this reduces their costs significantly.

“This will increase their margins, because they pay us the dollar a month, as opposed to reselling the product,” Gupta said.

“MSPs are very excited about this,” Hayes said. “They can differentiate with a mobility service and have high margins as well.”