Kaseya Issues 'Cleanup' Release of Core Platform

Kaseya, the managed services provider (MSP) and IT management software and services company, which has been under new management for the last seven months, on Friday issued a cleanup release of its core management platform that the company's CEO said is all about restoring trust.

Yogesh Gupta, an executive with senior management experience at CA and FatWire Software, came aboard as Kaseya's president and CEO in June, when New York-based Insight Venture Partners made a significant investment in the Swiss company. Kaseya Virtual System Administrator (VSA) 6.5, released Friday after a three-week beta testing phase, is the result of new development processes at Kaseya, Gupta said in an interview.

"Over the last four-and-a-half months, we have transformed the way we manage our product," Gupta said. "We identified over 400 bugs that were serious -- about 100 were identified by customers and 300 we found through internal testing. Some of those bugs are quality issues, some are usability issues and some are performance issues."

Other than the 400 bug fixes, the 6.5 release includes a number of enhancements. The new version brings support for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2, architectural enhancements to facilitate third-party integrations and previously promised enhanced integrations with Kaseya Anti-Virus (KAV), Kaseya Anti-Malware (KAM) and Kaseya Backup (KBU).

The 6.5 release, along with a planned schedule of releases every four months with regular patches in between are "all about trying to rebuild trust," Gupta said. "For this release, we had to do a lot of cleanup. The next release is going to be a very exciting release."

Even ahead of the 6.5 release, Gupta said new company processes, such as rigorous pre-release testing of patches, a predictable, every-other-week patch release schedule and the elimination of random new features in patches, are having an impact.

"The number of incoming support calls in December was half what it was in July," Gupta said.

As for what might be in the next release, Gupta wasn't ready to say. "I'm being fairly deliberate about how we go about communicating to customers," he said. A full roadmap for the major features of the every-four-month VSA releases should be forthcoming at the Kaseya Connect conference in Las Vegas from April 14-16.

A few major integrations are obvious candidates for that roadmap. Within a few months of Insight Venture Partner's investment, Kaseya acquired Rover Apps, Zyrion Inc. and 365 Command. All have been rebranded as standalone Kaseya products but await full integration into Kaseya's core suite.

In the meantime, Gupta said future acquisitions are always possible but he suggested that they weren't a top priority at the moment. "The acquisitions we did, we did very quickly," he said. "I was working [with Insight Venture Partners] both on looking at Kaseya and helping us find assets. We started rolling on them before we came to Kaseya."

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 31, 2014