Kaseya formally announces its new exchange for the sharing of scripts and other automation tools. Up since the end of June, the exchange has over 700 content items so far, with most of them being free to download.

Remote management and monitoring software provider Kaseya has formally announced the availability of Automation Exchange, a community-sourced, online, open marketplace for sharing all matter of network automation, including agent procedures, scripts, monitoring sets, reports, and project templates. While most of the over 250 items on the Exchange so far are free, they can also be listed for sale.

“We already had a community that consists of a forum, and our help desk has a forum to talk, and as part of those discussions we saw customers sharing scripts, but we haven’t had anything this structured before,” said Frank Tisellano Kaseya’s Senior Director of Product Management.

Tisellano said that the exchange allows MSPs who develop automation inside of their own products to share it with others.

“Today, automation has become essential to success at scale,” he said. “If you don’t automate your business, it’s increasingly difficult to survive. The challenge for newer or time-pressed MSPs is how to get started automating.”

The Exchange was actually launched at the end of June, but the official announcement was held until the Exchange had generated a critical mass of users, and Kaseya had some success stories to tell.

“The reaction has been very, very positive,” Tisellano said.

Tisellano indicated that while Kaseya was able to look to well-known exchanges like the App Store, the Google Play Store and the Salesforce App Exchange as models, they had to devote extra attention to ensuring script reliability.

“We knew we would have to address concerns about scripts, and whether they are reliable, so we created a review mechanism so people could review them, as well as the discussions around them,” he said. Users can rate scripts, engage in online discussions, and contact developers. They can also request code or scripts they would like to see developed by Kaseya or the community.

Contributors to the site include both MSPs and enterprise IT groups, with the ratio so far being about 70-30 in favour of the MSPs. Vendor partners, like IPGlue, ESET, Veeam and BitDefender have also posted content, as have people from Kaseya’s sales, engineering and professional services teams.

“We are still figuring it out ourselves how far this will go,” Tisellano said. “The numbers so far have been very promising. We have over 700 content items now, and by the end of the year, we feel strongly we will have over 1000. We think we have had a good rate of signing up, considering so far it has just been quietly announced in our customer newsletter. The people who are using it are very actively engaged. The signs point to a lot of customer engagement, but I think that has yet to be seen.”

Most MSPs don’t seem to fear posting automation scripts they have developed will help competitors at their expense.

“A couple of them did raise that concern,” said Mike Puglia, Kaseya’s Chief Product Officer. However, there is an innate human relationship especially among technology people, that works against this. Besides, we aren’t really giving away the kings to the kingdom, but these scripts do help people, including scripts for Windows 10.”

“There is a huge variety of automation you can share or sell without impairing your business, because your differentiation is you and your people,” Tisellano said. “The automation is not the thing that makes the MSP, and differentiates them from their competitors, even though it will make them successful.”

About 90 per cent of the scripts on the Exchange so far are free.

“For MSPs who have developed really valuable scripts, if they want more than kudos, there is some serious money to be made,” Tisellano said. “That’s not what we are seeing so far though. It’s mainly about sharing your expertise and building your reputation in the community.”

The site is https://automationexchange.kaseya.com.