Kaseya has also released a new survey highlighting the practices being following by the most successful MSPs today.
Miguel Lopez, Senior Vice President and General Manager for MSP Solutions at Kaseya
Kaseya is beefing up the support it provides for MSPs with the creation of a net-new position to address the needs of that segment. Miguel Lopez, who was an MSP himself for over 20 years, most recently with All Covered, has been named Senior Vice President and General Manager for MSP Solutions. His role is explicitly to work with Kaseya’s MSP partners to better address their needs and business problems, and help them become more effective.
“The feeling around Kaseya is that even though MSPs make up over 80 per cent of our business, we had lost our way around MSPs somewhat, and part of my job is to improve communication and deliver our message,” Lopez said. “My background is as an MSP, and that is my focus.”
Lopez said that the MSP community as a whole had a feeling their issues and concerns could be better addressed. Speaking from a meeting with EMEA MSPs in the Netherlands, he emphasized that the vendor is getting out there again and talking with MSPs to determine their needs and do its best to address them.
“Last week we had our internal sales kickoff at Kaseya, and we spent a day offering training and sessions around better understanding the MSPs and the areas they need more help on,” Lopez said. “This included webinars and speakers we will have this year to help them grow their business. We want to have our own team understand our MSP customers better, while being aware that this isn’t something that will happen overnight.”
To provide further assistance to its MSPs, Kaseya has released the findings of its fifth annual MSP Global Pricing Survey, which focuses on highlighting the key differences between high and low growth MSPs. It was based on almost 400 MSPs across more than 30 countries.
The study found that a significant number of partners were posting double digit monthly recurring revenue (MRR) growth. 23% reported MRR over 20 per cent, while an additional 30 per cent reported annual MRR growth between 11 and 20 per cent.
“The surveys were randomly sent out to MSPs, but we then looked at what the high growth MSPs are doing and seeing what the differences are from the others,” Lopez said. “We found clear differences in what the ones growing at 10 per cent or more are doing. It’s part of what identifies what makes MSPs more successful.”
One key differentiation was in security services. High growth MSPs were more likely to identify security as a key competitive advantage, and have indicated that ‘heightened security risks’ is the top IT problem or service that they expect their clients to have for 2016. 75 per cent offer Desktop Security services. They are also more likely to offer Identity and Access Management services, which have been growing at a 33 per cent Compound Annual Growth Rate over the past three years.
Another key differentiator is that high-growth MSPs charge more. They charge more per hour for their techs, have a larger hourly price spread between level one, two and three technicians, and charge more on average for monthly server support and maintenance.
“MSPs who grow faster can charge more because they are pickier about their customers,” Lopez said. “They need to think about the customers they want to have, what kind of services they want, and how they can best reach them.”
Lopez also stressed that MSPs need to consider whether when they do value pricing if they are leveraging risk.
“For example, customers who have older PCs who replace them only when they break, and who often have older software are higher risk customers. You have to charge them more, because they are more work. Those customers who look at technology to help them grow, may be charged less, because there’s a better chance I can help them grow their business and my revenue will grow from that.”
The survey also found that high-growth MSPs are more than twice as likely to offer cloud-based services like monitoring, hosting, backup/recovery, and desktop/server management, to provide hosting services for customer-owned equipment, and to offer cloud services like IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
Lopez said the fundamental lessons from the data is that those MSPs that are evolving and being more entrepreneurial in taking on new services will continue to grow, and those that aren’t will get bought up or go out of business.
“Everybody knows they have to change with the market, but many people don’t know how,” he said. “They know you have to change, but how do you do it? Others are afraid of making changes due to the repercussions of making changes.”
Lopez said that when he was an MSP, even though he was technical, there were things he did not know which he had to get to move beyond the maturity point.
“If you don’t understand marketing and arent good at it — outsource it,” he said. “In sales, it’s not just throwing salespeople up, it’s leveraging things like promotions. You need to run it as a business. Even today, there are people who don’t get it, and I still have those conversations.”
