Kaseya Buys Cloud Management Tools Vendor

LAS VEGAS -- In its ongoing quest to provide more components of the managed service provider (MSP) tool stack and broaden the definition of that stack, Kaseya acquired Unigma, a maker of cloud management tools.

One of the pioneers of the remote management and monitoring (RMM) toolsets for MSPs, Kaseya has lately branched out into the professional services automation (PSA) tools market. While CEO Fred Voccola argues the traditional market of managing endpoints for SMBs remains a very strong business, he contends that the far greater opportunity lies in providing managed services to those customers around emerging technology areas.

The Unigma acquisition, completed on March 31 and unveiled during the KaseyaConnect 2017 conference in Las Vegas this week, represents one of those emerging technology areas. Kaseya is making the functionality available immediately as the Unigma Cloud Management Suite and as a cloud complement to the Traverse network management tools in the Kaseya IT Complete Platform.

"Unigma is about managing public clouds from Amazon, Microsoft and Google," said Mike Puglia, Kaseya's chief product officer, from the keynote stage.

A core component of Unigma is a Cloud Manager, which provides a single dashboard for monitoring Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud instances, and for performing and automating public cloud tasks in the Unigma interface rather than by logging in to the individual clouds.

One example of the way Cloud Manager could be used would be turning off a quality assurance lab in a public cloud for a customer over the weekend when it's not in use and would merely be costing a customer money, Puglia said.

Other components include a Unigma Billing Manager, which will help MSPs invoice customers based on each customer's utilization, and a Unigma Cloud Cost Optimizer, which performs cloud cost savings analysis to help customers right-size their public cloud spending to match their business needs.

In his keynote, Voccola called Unigma the leader in a burgeoning market of cloud market solutions. Kaseya, which is privately held, did not disclose the value of the deal. Kaseya executives say Unigma has about 75 MSP customers, in addition to enterprise customers. Unigma CEO Kirill Bensonoff stayed on and is now running the Unigma business unit for Kaseya.

Voccola says Unigma could help MSPs and their SMB customers overcome a common trap. "[Most] SMBs believe that public cloud providers manage their infrastructure -- monitoring, security, backup. We all know they don't," he said. Conducting a cost audit using the Unigma Cloud Cost Optimizer could start a productive conversation that ends with SMBs realizing what kinds of help they need with their cloud environments.

The process was eye-opening internally at Kaseya, he said. Kaseya was spending $4 million annually across AWS, Azure and Google for various services. Using Unigma, he said the company discovered "we only needed to be spending $3.4 million. There was about $600,000 that we were misappropriating."

Running similar proof of concepts would be a great managed service, he said. "This is game changing for our MSPs."

Posted by Scott Bekker on May 10, 2017