Kaseya Adds Mobility Management, Updates Cloud Infrastructure

Kaseya has rolled out an update to its cloud-based IT management platform that adds mobile app device management and boosts the underlying cloud infrastructure, the company said Tuesday.

"I think the two big updates are going to create opportunities for us and challenges to our competition," Kaseya CEO Yogesh Gupta said.

The Release 9 update adds integrated mobility management, with features to help partners with easier onboarding, device deployment and management. The mobile management also has a focus on security, with centralized preset security policies and encrypted containerized applications.

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The update leverages the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) suite it gained with the acquisition of Rover Apps in July of 2013 and the AuthAnvil acquisition last fall.

While the feature updates are important, what makes this update a "game-changer" when it comes to mobility management is the pricing, Gupta, said. The mobility management costs $1 per user per month, or $10 per user per year with unlimited devices. That's a drastic departure from the competition, Tom Hayes, Kaseya vice president of product marketing, said, with competitive prices sitting around $45 to $50 per user or device per year.

Hayes said Kaseya sees the future of the market around $1 per user per month, and by jumping early, Kaseya will get "first movers advantage" in the market. Gupta and Hayes agreed that the pricing structure will help Kaseya's MSP customers offer mobility management to customers at an affordable price, or even wrap into their regular offerings. Especially for small and midmarket MSPs, that sets them up for a competitive advantage, they said.

"The reason why smaller businesses, or midmarket or MSPs, have not adopted mobile management aggressively is it's hard to set up, it's hard to use, it’s a different product ... I think the fact that it's a single integrated solution, easy to use and priced right so that it gives our customers everything we need at a price they can afford. I think, to me, that is a game-changer," Gupta said. "I think we expect tremendous penetration into the marketplace."

In addition to mobility management, Kaseya also has announced updates to its back-end cloud infrastructure, which Hayes said would improve performance and scalability. The update is a big investment for Kaseya, with several million dollars invested, Hayes said, adding flash memory, Fusion-io cards, redundancy and security features.

While not all of Kaseya's partners use the company's hosted solution, 60 percent of customers choose the Software-as-a-Service option, Hayes said. As those customers often look for performance first when evaluating the solution, Gupta said Kaseya felt it was crucial to have the best infrastructure. Gupta said current customers won't necessarily immediately notice the impact of the added security and scalability features, but he expects they will see the benefits of performance upgrades.

"The key thing here is we realize our customers are moving faster and faster to the cloud and we, today, have more cloud customers than our competition, so we wanted to have an underlying infrastructure that provides them with the best possible experience that money can buy," Gupta said.

The updates this week are part of Kaseya's push to roll out quarterly updates to its IT management platform, a commitment the company has stuck to for the past year.

"I think we are setting a pace that is absolutely unmatched in our industry and in our market," Gupta said.

Glenn Kemp, director of technical services at Winnipeg, Manitoba-based Clear Concepts, a Kaseya partner for five years, said the updates to the mobility management systems will help drive simplicity for his technicians and service desk. The onboarding process, in particular, can be "onerous," he said, but he expects the Kaseya updates will help smooth those challenges.

"Anything we do we'd like to consolidate that under Kaseya, if at all possible, and this is a huge step ahead in that," Kemp said.

He said mobility management and BYOD is a huge challenge for his clients, especially clients with data security concerns in the health-care and social services business. However, it is also a challenge for smaller or midmarket MSPs, like Clear Concepts, to get the scale needed to manage the utilities independently at a reasonable cost.

"I know that's a big push for a lot of enterprises, but it's also important in the midmarket as well. Making something that can be very expensive and consolidated into something simplified that an MSP like ourselves can deliver," Kemp said.

PUBLISHED FEB. 3, 2015