Fred Voccola who has an extensive background in software and IT infrastructure companies, is the new CEO, and he pledges commitment to both customers and channel partners, which will make Kaseya well-loved in the industry.

Remote management and monitoring software provider Kaseya has a new CEO. Fred Voccola, who has an extensive background in software and IT infrastructure companies, takes over. Yogesh Gupta, who became CEO when Insight Venture Partners acquired Kaseya two years ago, has been elected Kaseya’s new Chairman of the Board.

Voccola said that he was brought in to lead the company through what it sees as an upcoming rapid growth phase.

“Companies can only do so many things at one time, and a little over two years ago, when Insight led the acquisition of Kaseya, the organization asked what we want to do from a vision perspective, and we made improvements, but that investment is really coming to fruition now,” Voccola said. “We are talking about exponential growth.”

Those changes, which took place under Gupta, saw the company successfully position itself from a software into a cloud company, with almost 60 per cent of new customers purchasing the cloud offering in 2014 , and new cloud subscriptions increasing by almost 40 per cent year-over-year. Kaseya successfully committed to a firm schedule of three releases a year, to ensure maximum product agility. The company also made several key acquisitions and integrations, including Scorpion Software for Identity and Access Management, RoverApps for BYOD management, 365 Command for cloud application administration, and Zyrion for cloud monitoring and management. Last, and from a partner perspective certainly not least, Kaseya grew the global channel business 40 per cent, year-over-year in 2014.

Kaseya also made significant investments in customer success over the last two years, but that’s an area where Voccola said the company is going to do more, and to do it quickly.

“We as an organization are substantially invested in customer commitment,” he said. “We want to be the best. We want everyone in the markets we serve to know us and to love us, and that means having a significant customer success organization, and a massive new initiative there immediately.”

Voccola said this initiative will have several components.

“You need to make sure the sales organization is selling reality, not myth, so customers can be successful,” he said. “Aggressive sales is good, but it has to be the kind where you can have a good long term relationship with the customer. In SaaS, you don’t make money in the first year. You have to set up the customer for long term success, Making sure sales compensation is tied to customer success long term is a key part of this.”

Voccola said that strong customer onboarding is another priority here.

“You need to have an onboarding organization to set the customer up for success, regardless of how much they spend,” he said. Other components include the technical support organization, account management, and the customer community group that brings customers together to share best practices. All will be reviewed and enhanced where necessary

“One thing that attracted me to Kaseya is that they are a vendor that is truly 100 per cent committed to being a joy to work with – having a world class product, being truly easy to work with, and showing a commitment to the customer,” Voccola said. “One commonality in my past companies is customers loved our products, and we created successful communities with the companies we worked with.”

Those past companies include his most recent, Yodle, which provides SMB digital and market automation solutions, where he was President and General Manager of the Brand Networks Division. Previous to that he was President of Nolio, a DevOps SaaS startup out of Israel, which was sold to CA Technologies in 2013. He was co-founder, President and CEO of Trust Technology, a cloud-based SaaS platform that provides comprehensive compliance monitoring and automation, which was sold to FGI Global. Before that, he was co-founder and COO for six years at Identify Software, which was sold to BMC Software in 2006, and stayed with BMC until 2009.

None of these companies were in the RMM space, although Voccola said that he knows it well as a consumer of RMM products, and that he worked with companies in the space in some roles, notably at BMC. While some of these companies were not strong channel companies, others were.

“Channels are different in every industry, but the key is a commitment to the business model,” he said. “Trust was completely channel driven, with the channels being other software providers and resellers. 80 per cent of Nolio’s revenue internationally was through partners and 20 per cent in the U.S. My preferred means of doing commerce is always with and through partners.”

Voccola said that while Kaseya’s commitment to three releases per year has brought short term clarity to customers and partners about what they are doing, they still need to do a better job of making their long term objectives clear.

“One thing that we have not done well in the last two years is communicate to the world what we are doing and why,” he said. “For instance, in the last 20 months, we have made $31 million in advanced R&D, and I don’t think the world knows that, about the investments we have made and how they have helped the products.”

Making that long term road map clearer for partners is another objective, he said.

“If I’m an MSP I want to know what Kaseya is doing for the next two to three years,” he said. “We haven’t done a great job at letting people know our vision, so that they can best plan their business strategically with us.”