New improvements for technicians include native Microsoft PowerShell integration, and improved file management capabilities.

Today, Kaseya is announcing the general availability of the VSA 9.5 remote monitoring and management [RMM] solution. While it builds on the theme of last year’s 9.4 release in enhancing the experience of MSP technicians working with the product, VSA 9.5 also contains some notable integrations. First, it unveils a new integration platform which provides an SDK for the cloud world. Secondly, Kaseya is announcing enhanced integrations between VSA and other Kaseya products.

“We are always looking at how to improve the technician experience, because they are the bread and butter of our MSPs’ business,” said Frank Tisellano,  GM for VSA at Kaseya. “However, we are also seeing a market that is becoming increasingly specialized in areas like backup and endpoint security and we want to make sure we have integrations with the best partners available. We also want to make sure than these are available to all our customers.”

The centrepiece here is the new Technology Alliance Partnerships [TAP] Platform, a new integration platform that provides advanced API access to Kaseya’s vendor partners, so they can easily build and deliver integrations to customers in a cloud world.

“The SDK is so important,” Tisellano said. “Our old process was designed for on-prem VSA customers, and there was a separate installation process. This is very much an app store process.”

The new process reflects the increased salience of the cloud to Kaseya’s business.

“We were really focused on the core experience, and for a very long time, on-prem was the vast majority of our customers,” Tisellano said. “In the last few years, we have been seeing massive movement to the cloud, and we want to make sure that cloud customers have that same great experience.”

Tisellano said that multiple vendor partners have been building integrations which are expected to be available today or shortly afterwards. These are: Acronis [Snap Deploy]; Bitdefender; Carbonite; Unitrends; Warranty Master; and Webroot. A seventh integration, with Customer Thermometer, is also pending, although it is slightly different because instead of using the TAP platform it integrates natively with Kaseya’s service desk and ticketing.

Tisellano said that the number of new vendor integrations is likely to expand significantly.

“If you look at our existing base of on-prem integrations, we have dozens and dozens of partners,” he stated. “We expect to see the same thing going forward with TAP. It will enable our partners to get access to our entire customer base, and enables customers to get access to all these partners.”

Enhanced integrations were announced between VSA 9.5 and Kaseya’s BMS [Business Management Solution and KCB [Kaseya Cloud Backup].

“The improvement of the BMS integration leverages VSA’s very powerful automation capabilities,” Tisellano said. “It adds automated ticket de-duplication to BMS to provide full linkage of all events to the root problem. It also both automatically closes and re-opens tickets when warranted.”

The integration with Kaseya Cloud Backup, Kaseya’s integration with Acronis which was a part of VSA 9.4, automates backup configuration, when desired.

“We are the number one reseller of Acronis Cloud Backup, and until now, MSPs have had to create backup plans for each machine individually,” Tisellano said. “That has been common in the industry. Backup isn’t something like AV, that lends itself to broad ‘set it and forget it’ policies. But increasingly, there are times when you do want to back up all machines the same way. More people are moving to managing by policy, and we are seeing it at every size level and every level of maturity. The increased automation is being driven by margin and pricing pressure. As a result, this integration now lets you configure backup plans in bulk.”

Two new enhancements to the technician experience are part of VSA 9.5.

“We made huge strides at enhancing this experience in 9.4, but we have added a couple new features,” Tisellano said. “We had feedback that they wanted native Microsoft PowerShell integration. They have been able to run PowerShell from VSA for years, but they haven’t been able to do it non-disruptively from terminal mode in Live Connect until now.

The other improvement is to file management.

“We have made transferring multiple files easier,” Tisellano indicated. “You couldn’t transfer entire folders before. File transfer can also now be done more quickly.”