Kaseya Rebrands as 'IT Management Cloud Company'

Kaseya, the midmarket-focused systems management company that counts MSPs as a major part of its customer base, is rebranding itself as the IT Management Cloud Company.

President and CEO Yogesh Gupta discussed the rebranding with RCP in a telephone interview this week from Kaseya Connect, the company's gathering of customers and partners in Las Vegas.

Gupta announced the rebranding and updated the company's product roadmap at the show.

"Management is happening more and more in the cloud," Gupta said. He described cloud management for Kaseya as having two meanings. One refers to management technology existing as a cloud service. The other has to do with integrating the management of third-party online services into Kaseya's offerings. Gupta mentioned several prominent examples of cloud services that customers need to have managed, including Microsoft's Azure, Amazon Web Services and Office 365, a suite Kaseya took a major step to manage last year with the acquisition of 365 Command.

Kaseya's new cloud vision represents another major initiative in the energetic tenure of Gupta, a former executive at CA and Fatwire Software who joined Kaseya in June when Insight Venture Partners invested in the company. In his first few months at Kaseya, Gupta introduced a new agile development process and oversaw the acquisitions of Rover Apps, Zyrion Inc. and 365 Command.

Gupta promised that although the cloud orientation is now strategic for Kaseya, no MSPs or midmarket customers will be forced to move from Kaseya's traditional on-premises tools until they're ready.

"My goal is to not force our customers to move off of the on-prem platform at all. The capabilities of what we offer in the cloud versus on-prem will be the same," Gupta said. "We will make it so I think they will want to move there. I don't see us forcing our customers. I actually think that they'll be pulled."

Some of the benefits Gupta said cloud platform customers will see include rapid and seamless security updates, a reduction in costs due to eliminating hardware and software licensing for on-premises management suite deployments, and the ability to view anonymous, aggregate performance data from other Kaseya customers that will provide early warnings on geographical issues or broadband service provider outages. At the same time, Gupta said Kaseya will work to protect MSP and customer investments in agent procedures, scripts and other customizations by providing upgrade paths to the cloud versions.

As for being pulled to the cloud, Gupta offered Kaseya itself as an example. "In the second half of 2013, more than 60 percent of new customers chose our cloud platform [versus on-premise] to run the IT management platform itself. Kaseya in the cloud is gaining tremendous momentum. More than 20 percent of our customers worldwide are using the cloud offering even though [Kaseya's cloud offering] has only been around for a few years," he said.

In the meantime, Kaseya is sticking to its newly aggressive release schedule. Fresh off the Jan. 31 release of Kaseya Virtual System Administrator 6.5, the company released a detailed roadmap for a 7.0 release by the end of May, an 8.0 release by the end of September and a 9.0 release by January 2015.

A Kaseya roadmap document with details on features planned for each release is available here.

Posted by Scott Bekker on April 17, 2014