An IPO in Kaseya's Future? Q&A with New CEO Fred Voccola
Fred Voccola admits that he's "drinking out of the firehose right now" in his first week as the new CEO of Kaseya, one of the prime mover companies in the remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools market for managed service providers (MSPs). But Voccola took a few minutes to speak with RCP about his plans for the company.
Here are some highlights of the conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity.
What are your plans for the company?
It's day three, so ask me in a few weeks. But the premise of coming on board and one of the things that turned me on about Kaseya is that Kaseya was one of the founding thought leaders of the MSP community. It's a great market. It's a market that's only going to grow substantially. As the demographics and dynamics of MSPs grow, this is a really exciting place to be. Kaseya has a great team.
I think the communication with the community is going to change. The primary focal point that we are going to have in this business from an operational standpoint is the single goal of having our partners and customers have the best experience in working with Kaseya.
[We'll focus on making the products] easy to use, powerful and scalable. We want customers to want to use the product. As a business, we need to be very easy to commercially interact with. It has to be a great experience to work with us -- business terms, customer terms, legal terms. Our commitment is to making the customer successful and being proactive in helping them do that.
"Kaseya is not a business where we need to sell it to a platform company. I see an IPO as a higher probability than a sale."
Fred Voccola, CEO, Kaseya
What should MSPs expect from Kaseya during your tenure?
From a product perspective in the coming weeks, there will be some pretty interesting announcements. Kaseya in the last 18-20 months has spent well north of $31 million in R&D in enhancing and developing our platforms. We're really excited to start communicating and rolling that out both for the MSPs, as well as midmarket IT.
Our customer base is 70-80 percent MSPs. What MSPs can expect in the next 60 days is they will notice a substantial advancement from where the industry is to what we deliver from a customer-success perspective. We're going to have incredible strides industrywide there. I think within 60 days it will hit the market in an incredible way.
In the past, you've come into companies and generated high growth and then a sale. Are you being brought in to prepare the company for a sale?
Hopefully, we get the high growth. Selling a company is never the objective. That's the path that was right for [some of] those companies for various reasons. At Nolio, I was brought in; now it's under CA, and doing very well at CA, by the way. Nolio was kind of the first player in the DevOps space doing release optimization. In that world, it's very difficult for a vendor to stay independent. Here at Kaseya, we have a platform. Kaseya is not a business where we need to sell it to a platform company. I see an IPO as a higher probability than a sale. If you look at the financial dynamics of Kaseya, it's easier for us to aggregate [other technologies into our platform]. As for the timing on an IPO, I have no idea.
Kaseya has acquired at least four companies or technologies over the last few years. Do you plan to continue with acquisitions?
Whether it's build or buy, we have a very robust and capable dev team and product organization. The world's going to see a lot of the fruits of what we've been building. We are looking to expand organically and inorganically. Looking at acquisitions is always an ongoing thing in a business like Kaseya's.
Kaseya has shifted a lot of product development to the cloud, although many users continue to run the on-premise versions. Will you continue to support on-premise versions?
One hundred percent yes. We are in the business of making our customers successful. Some of our customers leverage an on-premise solution. Some customers prefer a cloud delivery model, and obviously we're going in that direction, as well. Cloud delivery is not the best solution for every customer. We're innovating on our entire platform.
What should Kaseya's MSP partners know about you?
This is not really about me but about the organizations I've been lucky enough to be a part of. I've been so blessed in my career where I'd love to say it's all been by design. I've worked with some absolutely phenomenal, amazing people. The one consistent thing I've learned from people who have been my mentors, peers, employees, all through my career is business is very simple. Have a product that makes your customer absolutely love it and love working with you. Everything else, the revenue, the profitability, all of that stuff takes care of itself.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on July 09, 2015