The new Kaspersky integration follows up last year’s successful integration with the other SolarWinds platform, N-central, and is part of an increased focus by Kaspersky on the RMM/PSA space to expand their MSP business.
Casper Teijema, global partner manager at Kaspersky
Cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky has announced an expansion of their relationship with SolarWinds. Last year they announced an integration with the SolarWinds N-Central RMM [Remote Monitoring and Management] platform. Now they are announcing a new integration with SolarWinds RMM, SolarWinds’ other RMM platform. It lets MSPs deploy and manage Kaspersky endpoint protection products for their customers through the SolarWinds management console, and automate routine tasks like security monitoring and anti-virus database updates.
“We announced a new integration with Solarwinds N-Central last May,” said Casper Teijema, global partner manager at Kaspersky. “The new RMM integration is a sequential one. It is a completely new integration, with brand new code.”
That first SolarWinds integration, with N-Central, has gone very well for Kaspersky.
“This was our starting point with SolarWinds, and it has been a great success,” Teijema said. “We have had quite a number of our partners request that integration, so it was market demand-driven. Several of our larger MSPs have used the N-able integration since its release.”
Kaspersky’s integrations with RMM and PSA [Professional Services Automation] providers is comparatively small compared with some endpoint security vendors who have had a deep focus on that area for years. It is growing however, and has been receiving increasingly more attention as managed services become an ever larger component of the solution provider market.
“We have similar integrations with ConnectWise on both the RMM and PSA side, and with PSA providers TigerPaw and Datto Autotask,” Teijema indicated. We have doubled our business there in 2019, and we did something similar in 2018. This has become an increasingly strategic business for us, as RMM and PSA integrations have become a core part of our strategy to reach the growing MSP community. We are really investing heavily in this area.”
The RMM/PSA strategy is one component of a broader Kaspersky strategy to penetrate the MSP market more deeply.
“The RMM and PSA integrations are just one part of how we are investing in the MSP space, Teijema said. “As well, we are expanding the MSP capabilities of our product to address the trends in MSP market which require greater automation and more specialization. These trends are stronger in North America today, but they are coming to Europe too. We are deepening this focus in order to be able to support an MSP market that is growing significantly.”
“Being a trusted service provider for many customers can be tough without automation,” said Paul Colwell, technical director at British-based Kaspersky partner OGL.” We do make full use of both SolarWinds RMM and Kaspersky security to provide the best service. This really helps us save technicians’ time to have them integrated and act like a unified solution without any additional development on our side.”
