SaaS Alerts added Reporting functionality to its original Management focus in 2021, and plans to provide a new Remediation capability in 2022.
Jim Lippie, CEO of SaaS Alerts
Today SaaS Alerts, which makes a SaaS monitoring and alerting solution,, specifically designed for MSPs to help them protect and monetize their customers’ core business SaaS applications, is announcing both strong growth in 2021, and its key objectives in 2022.
“Following the beta in August 2020, we went GA with the software on January 20, said Jim Lippie, CEO of SaaS Alerts. “We had ten beta MSPs on the platform then. We finished 2021 with 370, and the total number of users on the platform is more than 120,000. This made it a great year for us.”
SaaS Alerts covers the full spectrum of the MSP space on their platform.
“We range from one-man MSP bands to MSPs with 1000 people,” Lippie said. “We appeal to any MSP that better wants to better protect MSP SaaS applications, regardless of size.
“We also raised $4.5 million in total funding, of which over $500,000 came directly from MSP owners or employees,” Lippie added. This was a part of the original funding plan, done in coordination with Channel Angels, which created a channel software funding vehicle that allowed MSPs to invest in the company.”
SaaS Alerts started out monitoring a relatively small number of applications, which have the most pull in the market. These included Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and Dropbox, During 2021, they expanded the apps that they covered.
“We added Slack, which is an app that we use ourselves,” Lippie indicated. “We have no physical location, so Slack has become our virtual office. That’s also why it’s important that MSPs monitor it on behalf of behalf of their clients.”
IT Glue, and NinjaOne were also added to the supported apps.
“As we have grown, partners have asked us to cover these RMM tools, and we will be adding others over the course of 2022,” Lippie noted.
Last year, SaaS Alerts redesigned their product infrastructure, rolling out a second application, and with plans for a third one in 2022.
“In terms of product, when we first conceived of the application it was what we call Manage today,” Lippie said. “You could set up alerting functionality, and integrations with PSAs. What we have done over the last several months is come up with a new architecture for the product – which now has three components: Manage, Report and Remediate. Report was built out in mid-year 2021.
“Sometimes demonstrating managed services’ value can be difficult because they are virtual,” Lippie said. Report shows what the MSP is doing on the back end to provide value.”
The Remediation functionality is a key roadmap item for 2022.
“Remediation is being released at the end of March,” Lippie said. “It is a big step for us, which will be able to remediate specific activities in customers’ applications. In Version 1, they will be able to do an automatic account lock. We are seeing over a million alerts a day, so this will lock accounts for MSPs and give them time to properly react.”
Version 2 will allow MSPs to be able to terminate dangerous file shares.
“Sharing information is both good and bad, with the bad part being that end users send out file shares that are anonymous and don’t expire,” Lippie stated. “That creates a security hole that we want to plug. With this, the MSP will be able to delete them right from the application. They will also be able to do the same thing with Microsoft guest user accounts. We have 125,000 users on our platform and 45,000 guest users. That’s a very high ratio, and it’s dangerous, because they go under the radar. Most companies don’t put MFA on them because they are not tied to a user.”
The company continued to fill out its roster in 2021, climbing to 21 employees, up from three in January. New hires included Pat Sullivan, as VP of Sales, Harsh Maur, as Software Engineer, DevSecOps Lead, and Liran Baron as Director of Technical Operations.
“On the partner side, we signed a strategic agreement with Zomentum [which makes a sales acceleration platform for MSPs],” Lippie said. “All our MSPs now get access to this. We also signed an agreement with Solutions Granted, a SOC as a Service Provider, to provide MSPs with SOC as-a-service. In addition, we are working with some large security companies right now, in some really fantastic OEM deals, where we become the back end security provider for some very large companies. We are very excited about what that could mean for us in 2022.
Lippie said the company is also taking steps to help its MSPs handle Microsoft 365 price increases which take effect on March 1st.
“We will be hosting webinars showing how to right-size protection and cost around each license type of Microsoft 365,” he indicated. “This is an opportunity for MSPs to become thought leaders about how they can better protect the application. We will spend the next three to five months working with them around the best messages around that, and giving them marketing materials to send that message.”
MSPs can register for one of three webinars being held on February 8th, 15th and 23rd at https://saasalerts.com/microsoft-price-increase-webinar/. Every webinar attendee will receive access to a MSFT 365 pricing calculator which incorporates the price increases and includes options for different margin expectations.
