Kaseya Fires a Shot Across the PSA Market's Bow
Kaseya on Tuesday launched the Kaseya Business Management Solution (BMS), which it billed as a generation beyond the current professional services automation (PSA) tools offered by ConnectWise, Autotask and Tigerpaw.
As part of the launch, Kaseya also unveiled a competitive upgrade promotion of one year of free licenses for all ConnectWise, Autotask and Tigerpaw customers. Kaseya is one of the original vendors to managed services providers (MSPs) and comes from the remote monitoring and management (RMM) side of the market. RMM providers typically partner with PSA vendors to offer integrated solutions to MSPs.
Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola contends the all-inclusive price of $25 per seat per month for Kaseya BMS is a third of what the PSA vendors currently charge. "We're saying the value of a PSA is not what ConnectWise or Autotask say it is," Voccola said in a telephone interview. "Spending money on an internally facing PSA system is not as good as hiring another sales rep or technician."
"PSA-plus-RMM is so first-generation. The MSPs that do server and workstation management only will be dinosaurs very soon."
Fred Voccola, CEO, Kaseya
The technology for BMS comes from Vorex, a Dallas-based PSA vendor that Kaseya recently acquired in a deal first disclosed in the BMS announcement. Voccola said Kaseya and Vorex together invested more than $25 million over the last three years in joint development. It was not clear whether the purchase price of Vorex was included in that sum.
Aside from the price per seat, what marks Kaseya BMS as a second-generation platform, according to the company, are a cloud-based system with authorized access from Web-enabled devices, an open platform, automated staff scheduling, a streamlined process for rolling out new service offerings, and project management and billing advances.
In the interview, Voccola objected to a question about whether the Vorex purchase and BMS release were defensive moves against PSA-RMM vertical consolidation by competitors, such as ConnectWise, which acquired RMM vendor LabTech in 2010.
"PSA-plus-RMM is so first-generation. The MSPs that do server and workstation management only will be dinosaurs very soon. We have over 1,000 customers who are using our Office 365 migration and management solution [365 Command]," Voccola said. "Instead of fighting the current, they're going with the current. RMM-plus-PSA just limits what MSPs need to do to be competitive in the next five to six years."
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 09, 2016