New Kaseya Release Enhances Mobile Management, Cloud Architecture

Continuing with its ambitious every-four-months update cycle, Kaseya shipped Release 9 of its product portfolio this week with significant enhancements to its mobility management, at an aggressive price, and to its cloud architecture.

Officially announced on Tuesday, R9 was available Jan. 31, in keeping with a shipment schedule of the last day of January, May and September that the company followed all through 2014.

On the mobility side, Kaseya released an Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution that ties together BYOD management, mobile device management and mobile application management.

"Mobility is an area that our managed service providers, especially, have come back to us and said they are getting bombarded," said Tom Hayes, vice president of product marketing for Kaseya, which has a customer base of over 70 percent MSPs, with the rest consisting of midmarket IT departments. "The market has multiple confusing, overlapping solutions. They've said it's really difficult for them to cobble together a service for their customers."

Hayes also said the price of $1 per month per user aims to disrupt a market filled with solutions that run from $4 to $15 per month for limited to full feature sets. "The reason we're being very aggressive is that we believe the market needs to get to this pricing level to [handle] the millions and millions and millions of devices that businesses will need to manage," he said in an interview.

In response to a question, Kaseya CEO Yogesh Gupta clarified that MSPs and direct customers could get the EMM solution as a standalone without dependencies on any other Kaseya products. "Of course, if they have VSA, these capabilities also integrate with server management, desktop management, et cetera," Gupta said. VSA is Kaseya's Virtual System Administrator, the company's full IT management platform.

Steve Brasen, an analyst with Enterprise Management Associates, agreed with Hayes' claim that the pricing is disruptive. "I've been reviewing pricing, and I have to say this is very aggressive pricing compared to the other vendors," Brasen said, noting that the $1 per month is per user, not per device.

To Brasen, the most important feature of the new release is unifying mobile management. "What Kaseya is doing here is they're taking their solutions across the mobile space and creating integration points. They can be managed from a single interface, they use a single asset database, which is very important, and they use the same processes for managing them," Brasen said.

With R9, Kaseya also went back to the drawing board to re-architect its cloud infrastructure. For several years, Kaseya has offered a Software-as-a-Service option for its systems management platform, and the approach is becoming increasingly popular with customers.

About 60 percent of new customers deploy with the cloud option, and of Kaseya's 10,000-customer user base, the number choosing the cloud platform is approaching 30 percent, Gupta said.

Working with its existing hosting partner, Kaseya overhauled its server architecture that supports the cloud it offers to clients with flash memory upgrades, enhancements to its security posture and new redundancies and fast failover configurations.

Gupta described Kaseya's ability to reconfigure the hardware as an advantage to working with a private-cloud hoster as opposed to one of the megavendor cloud providers. "In our architecture, everything has physical and logical parallel paths for full redundancy. You can't get that with the generic AWS and other providers, where you cannot configure the hardware to your liking," Gupta said.

Posted by Scott Bekker on February 04, 2015