Kaseya Partners Prepare For First User Conference
Gniffke, a director and account executive at Costa Mesa, Calif.-based MSP inhouseIT, laughed about the "mini-Kaseya conferences" his company organized in the past.
"We actually held one at our office. We brought together Kaseya customers from all over [the country]," Gniffke said. "But later, when the support calls started coming in from them, we realized that this wasn't really one of our core competencies. ... You know, training other managed service providers."
Somebody at Kaseya must think Gniffke's selling himself short. He's a featured speaker in the Best Practice Series of seminars at the April 1 to 3 conference, which is being held in Las Vegas.
Gniffke's topic is "Identifying Potential Customers for Managed Services". His quick take on the subject: "The best way to identify a client is to build your company as an MSP. You attract who you are."
About a third of the featured speakers at the conference will be users like Gniffke, said Dan Shapero, senior vice president of marketing at Kaseya.
Rounding out the mix are industry experts like Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki and THINKstrategies founder Jeff Kaplan, as well as Kaseya senior management.
The Kaseya User Conference was the result of the seven-year-old MSP platform provider reaching critical mass as a company and a user community, Shapero said.
"The company finally hit that milestone where we felt we were big enough," he said. "There was strong customer demand for this, not just to meet Kaseya employees but also their peers."
Shapero added that the registrations for the sold-out conference reflect Kaseya's customer base of about 80 percent MSPs and 20 percent in-house IT management.
Kaseya said its Managed Service Automation solutions service more than 1 million end points in 25 countries, and the company generated $45 million in bookings last year and projects $100 million for 2007.
Kaseya customers include 3M, redbox, United Health Care, Technology Services Group, Kerridge (ADP) and universities around the globe.
InhouseIT's proactive, fixed-fee managed services represent about 15 percent to 20 percent of the company's business, Gniffke said. He said he's excited about sharing best practices with fellow Kaseya customers at the conference.
"I'm looking forward to knowledge-sharing," Gniffke said. "What's valuable about these conferences is gaining a better understanding of what's sometimes called the 'co-opetition,' what those other people are doing in the market space."
What would inHouseIT like to see from Kaseya in the future?
"We wouldn't be where we're at today without [Kaseya's platform]," Gniffke said. "So we would like to see just the continued maturity of their product."
Farther down the road, Gniffke said he also would like to see someone come up with a solution that integrates an MSP platform with CRM.
"We use Kaseya [for the MSP side] and Connectwise for CRM. Could Kaseya do something that would integrate CRM? Or the other way around, Connectwise? We have very good relationships with both companies," he said. "But that's the question, who's going to come up with the 'Microsoft Outlook' for managed services?"