The new offering is much stronger than what Kaseya had before for Office 365 Backup, and is something that Kaseya partners should be able to sell to their own customers at a good margin,
Frank Tisellano Jr., Kaseya’s VP of product management and design
Kaseya has announced a major enhancement to their Office 365 Backup capability through a new OEM partnership with SaaS data protection provider Spanning, The Office 365 backup will be deployed as an integrated module within VSA by Kaseya, their remote monitoring and management solution. Kaseya Office 365 Backup will be available in the second half of 2018.
“Previously we provided Office 365 Backup through 365 Command,” said Frank Tisellano Jr., Kaseya’s VP of product management and design. “365 Command is for management and reporting primarily. It does simple backup but it is nothing like this. The Spanning offering is mature and deep and serves our market in a way that 365 Command does not.”
Kaseya says that 87 per cent of their MSPs now provide Office 365 services, representing over 9 million deployed seats. 49 per cent of MSPs have expanded their Office 365 service offering to include backup, leading Kaseya to decide that a more robust offering was needed.
“Spanning is a mature company based in Austin, Texas, with thousands of customers,” Tisellano said. “They make multiple SaaS application backups, including those for Office 365, G Suite, and Salesforce. They are experts at seeing how customers use these applications in an intimate way. They know SaaS workflows well, and they can create great workflows around backup and restore.”
Tisellano noted that the Spanning solution also had other attributes which made their product an ideal one for MSPs.
“They are pure cloud to cloud, so there is no software to install, no servers to spin up, and you back things up that night,” he said. “It’s really, really simple. Setting up backups is a two-click operation, and when you do restores, which is the crux of any backup solution, the MSP can do it, or delegate access to the customer if that’s what they want. So it’s not only very simple, but it’s also very low touch for the MSP. They can build a high margin service with very little work.”
Spanning sells through its own partner network, and knows the channel, Tisellano added.
“They have a history of delivering these backup services in the channel very effectively,” he said. “They know how to handle multi-tenant. They know how to price software so MSPs can make up for the money that they don’t make on Exchange backup.”
Tisellano said that the code base under the hood that Kaseya will receive is that same as Spanning’s own customers get.
“Our customers will get all the updates they give their own customers,” he said. “What is distinct about this is that it is directly integrated with our VSA PSA software, so it’s all managed as a single pane of glass.”
Tisellano stressed that this kind of ancillary service is critical to MSPs selling Microsoft today.
“It comes down to them being able to replace revenue that used to exist in managing Exchange servers with SaaS application management,” he said. “MSPs have told us that it is hard to wrap a coherent service around Office 365 – because Microsoft is selling against them. MSPs haven’t had a good answer for that in a long time. This is a way for them to create a tangible, coherent service around Office 365 that they can sell for a good margin.”
So might the Spanning partnership be extended around other SaaS applications that they provide?
“There’s definitely that possibility,” Tisellano said. “They are great partners already. However, we want to focus on this for now. There’s no reason that we couldn’t go further, but we don’t have any concrete plans to do so now.”
Spanning is a Gold Sponsor of Kaseya Connect 2018, which will take place in Las Vegas May 8-10 at Mandalay Bay. They will exhibit and present during the conference. Additional details about Kaseya Office 365 Backup will be revealed at that time.
