Kaseya's SaaS Program Adds First Channel Partners

Initial members include ASCII Group, Cloud Services Depot, Ingram Micro Australia, Jamcracker, Lenovo and the Virtual Administrator division of Network Depot, according to Dan Shapero, senior vice president of business development and channel marketing at Kaseya.

The SaaS program is designed to attract more VARs to Kaseya's new K2 platform announced earlier this year without having to make a significant investment but still get the support of a channel distributor or other aggregator, Shapero said.

"When you have a pay as you go model like Kaseya, you have to come up with ways that are affordable for customers to sign up. [Indirect] channels is always a great way to go. It's a great way for us to reach new customers, new markets," Shapero said.

Kaseya's SaaS program includes hosted applications, access to data center experts, an uptime commitment with service level agreement, customized landing pages for branding and a customer portal for billing and support, according to the company.

In addition, the company provides training to help new service providers shift to proactive IT management to create a recurring revenue model.

"With Kaseya's architecture, and with our managed service you can centrally manage all your clients' businesses. It's one simple agent that can manage anything behind the firewall. There's no real infrastructure on site," Shapero said. "With the K2 platform, it's an under-the-hood enhancement and we made it multi-tenant. You can manage multiple instances of Kaseya from one console. It's easier to maintain, update."

The hosted version of the K2 platform allows MSPs to offer services without any investment from their customers, or without a length-based contract if they so choose.

"Rather than make a commitment up front to someone like Kaseya, they pay as they deploy. For a smaller MSP, this is a better way to go. If you thought you were too small to be an MSP or that you couldn't afford to be an MSP, that's not the case."