Partners: Kaseya Regime Rekindling Partner Confidence

For some of Kaseya's partners, the changes new CEO Fred Voccola has instituted is giving newfound faith in the remote monitoring and management vendor.

Last week, Kaseya held its first partner committee meeting in Miami to give its partners a chance to speak with Kaseya executives.

Oscar Romero, an engineer at DataPrise, an MSP based in Rockville, Md., said he was "blown away" by the Miami event.

"[Kaseya is] actively listening," he said. "Meetings [at the event ran] late because they want to hear what everyone has to say."

But what was more impressive, according to DataPrise's Romero, was the return of Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol, which partners wanted as a safeguard in the platform behind Kaseya's own tool, and the option to utilize Ninite installer software, which Kaseya previously said it would not support. Romero said those options, which until recently were unavailable to partners, gave him proof that the company's newest executives are listening.

DataPrise's Romero, who had worked at Kaseya for almost three years and left the company in 2013 to join DataPrise, said that after Kaseya was sold to private-equity firm Insight Venture Partners, DataPrise's relationship with the company became rocky.

"To be honest, it felt like we were being told the direction Kaseya was going, and then being told that is where we [DataPrise] needed to go," he said.

"When you have a regime that tells me how to run my business, I felt like I wasn’t being heard, I felt like they weren't concerned about what fits the client the best," Romero said. "I feel now that there is leadership in Kaseya, they are going to take care of the company and the customers as well, and I am not an easy person to convince," he said.

For some partners, however, these changes and updates are simply too little, too late.

Glenn Kemp, director of technology services for Clear Concepts, a current Kaseya customer that also decided to license and leverage technology from a Kaseya competitor, said he worked with Kaseya for five years before he decided to switch his platform.

"Changing platforms is a considerable undertaking," he said, "I have to walk away from the investment I have made in Kaseya and invest a couple hundred thousand dollars in new technology."

According to Kaseya's Cuevas, one of the biggest challenges for the new regime is getting the word out to all its customers about the changes it is making and the impact they will have on partners' business. "We have 10,000 customers; that is a lot of ground to cover," he said.

Cuevas said Kaseya is streamlining the licensing process and fixing issues with its customer rep program. Yet he added that some of Kaseya’s previous processes did work but were not consistently implemented to every customer. "What we are doing now is amplifying those good things and [taking] them to all parts of the company," he said.

"So far, this is one small piece dropped in an ocean of the things we want to do," he said, "but I feel pretty good with where we are so far. It's a process."

PUBLISHED NOV. 11, 2015