5 Things MSPs Can Expect From Kaseya This Year

New IT Management Platform, Cloud Investments In The Works

Kaseya plans to introduce a new IT management platform and API as well as a series of enhancements around its existing management platform, security and certifications.

Yogesh Gupta, CEO of the Boston-based IT management company, revealed his upcoming plans in an interview with CRN at the company's Connect conference in Orlando, Fla.

All of the investments are focused around either allowing MSPs to get the same job done with fewer resources or helping MSPs deliver new chargeable services to end-user customers.

Read on to learn what you can expect from Kaseya in the year ahead.

5. More Security And Certification Options

The number of high-profile breaches over the past 12 months has prompted Kaseya to bolster its offerings around secure identities and access, Gupta said. The company has listened to its MSPs and end customers and is now offering multifactor authentication, where both a user ID and password are necessary to retrieve a one-time code generator.

Moving forward, Kaseya is adding new security and auditing capabilities to its signature virtual system administrator (VSA) platform to ensure compliance standards in health care and other verticals are met.

The vendor also is working with more third-party providers and bolstering the certification options available through its Technology Alliance program to help its top MSP partners stand out.

4. New API And Infrastructure Management Capabilities

Kaseya will in the coming months introduce an API that makes it easier for MSP customers to integrate third-party tools and access data inside Kaseya's system, Gupta said.

The company's investment will result in more high-performing, scalable and reliable tools for MSPs to use to manage customer infrastructure. MSPs will be able to bring new customers online in minutes, upgrade customers more smoothly, eliminate single points of failure and reduce downtime, Gupta said.

3. Improved VSA Scalability In The Cloud

The engineering methodology for Kaseya's VSA has changed since Gupta's arrival at Kaseya in 2013, when he committed to new releases of the IT management system every four months. Within two years, the more frequent releases have improved the capabilities around VSA and helped MSPs become more efficient, Gupta said.

Kaseya has invested millions of dollars in private cloud infrastructure and data centers in North America and Europe, and Gupta said customers are beginning to reap the scale and capability benefits from that investment.

VSA has improved performance and fault tolerance and, with Fusion-io cards implemented underneath the database servers, IOPS are expected to increase from 3,500 to 100,000, he said.

2. New IT Management Platform Coming This Summer

But Kaseya's biggest news surrounds not its existing offerings but Project Helios, an IT management platform to be delivered as a service.

The project, which is expected to go through beta testing this summer, will offer sophisticated capabilities around global directories to help MSPs track, manage and store enormous amounts of data. The need arises from the enormous amount of data being created by cloud services, mobile devices and the Internet of Things.

"Machine-generated data is just enormous in volume," he said.

Gupta expects MSPs to begin working with Helios in the coming months.

1. Will Helios Replace VSA?

Gupta indeed expects that Helios eventually will replace VSA, but emphasized that Kaseya will continue to invest in VSA since many MSPs will be using both programs in the medium term.

He emphasized that Helios will have a very different look and feel than VSA since it was designed more than a decade later with a modern user interface and with social, mobility, analytics and the cloud in mind.

"I think it will be a very different way of doing things," Gupta said.

He expects some MSPs will decide to use Helios for everything, while others will use one or two Helios apps but rely on VSA for 80 percent of their core functions.