Other enhancements to Kaseya VSA include improving the discovery engine to make finding and categorizing machines more accurate and comprehensive.

Kaseya has announced the general availability of Kaseya VSA 9.4, the company’s remote monitoring and management (RMM) solution. The new release makes several changes to enhance the technician experience. It also brings together broad backup capabilities at a low price point.

“The 9.4 release of VSA emphasizes that our people listen,” said Fred Voccola, Kaseya’s CEO. “90 per cent of the things that are new here are things we have vetted with our customers.

“Kaseya is about helping our MSPs make money and grow their business,” Voccola said. “We know that everybody says that. But we are committed to buying or building companies and products to let MSPs give customers what they want, with the goal of staying 6-18 months ahead of the market. For instance, we came out with a new cloud backup offering, which helps MSP make a lot of money because its about 45 per cent less expensive than every other offering in the market. That lets MSPs offer the ability to back up everything – not just mission critical things – at a price that still makes sense for the end customer.”

Several of the enhancements in this release are focused on enhancing the technician experience.

“Technician experience and usability is critical for MSPs,” said Mike Puglia, Kaseya’s Chief Product Officer. “MSPs biggest costs are in their employees. If we can make them more efficient and productive, they are more profitable.”

Live Connect On Demand lets MSPs conduct remote sessions with end users who do not have a Kaseya agent installed, broadening out VSA support capabilities.

“In 9.4, we have enhanced the type of customers and end users that techs can support,” Puglia said. “Live Connect on Demand is for situation where the user is away from their managed computer, like where they are using their home machine where they don’t have the agent. It would also apply for a new customer who you haven’t rolled out to yet, or a break-fix customer who doesn’t have agents. Today, you can’t support that use case. MSPs have bought other tools to handle this use case. Now we have expanded our capabilities so they don’t have to.”

Live Connect Mobile allows techs to troubleshoot from mobile devices, significantly improving a capability that did exist before.

“We had some basic functionality like views to the ticket, but we have taken it to the next step,” Puglia said. “Before they could see the tickets. Now they can not only see the tickets, but the entire Live Connect experience, and can go into the registry or anywhere else.”

In addition, Kaseya Extensions provide one-click deployment and execution of techs’ favorite support applications and utilities on any device. Real-time remote control recording provides a complete visual audit trail to improve support quality and streamline regulatory compliance. Universal Search provides faster access to users, agents, groups and views across the entire organization. Printers, switches, routers and other networked devices can now be managed remotely over a secure socket shell (SSH) from a single dashboard without any network configuration.

VSA 9.4 now offers full File, folder and full image backup for Windows PCs, Windows servers, Macs and virtual machines, including Hyper-V, VMware and Xen.

“From a direct revenue perspective, the backup piece is astronomical,” Voccola said. “We now allow MSPs to have backup for everything – everyone should back up everything. This allows MSPs to offer comprehensive backup solution at a very low price.”

“Every MSP that I talk to says things like they use vendor X for premium backup service, and vendor Y because they are good at virtual and vendor Z for cost-conscious customers,” Puglia said. “They have multiple tools and ignore things their tools don’t cover, like backing up Macs. We’ve brought that all together at a price point that backs up everything at a price that makes sense. They also have the flexibility to stores things locally on a network, or in the cloud, either Kaseya’s cloud or the MSP’s own cloud.”

Kaseya has also enhanced its discovery engine with this release to make finding and categorizing machines more accurate and comprehensive.

“One of the biggest costs for MSPs is onboarding new customers,” Puglia said. “MSPs run a discovery, and it sometimes misses things, so techs have to go back manually. MSPs eat these onboarding-related costs. The discovery engine now applies best practices policies and sets them up for monitoring automatically. Having an accurate automated discovery differentiates us.”

“The product now allows MSPs to do rapid discovery of everything on the network, which in addition to being a great tool, is also a great sales tool for the MSP with prospects,” Voccola said.

Support was also announced for the latest Red Hat 7 and Ubuntu 16 Linux distributions, as well as new policy management for Windows Server 2016 and Mac Sierra operating systems.