7 Big Releases from Kaseya Connect 2018
The MSP management software provider, at its Kaseya Connect conference, unveiled a series of releases designed to increase technician efficiency.
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Kaseya says it’s been “grinding off a little rust, tightening bolts and replacing rivets” from its KaseyaONE platform. The upgraded system, the company says, will be released as an ongoing series of crisp and tight integrations rather than “big bang” releases. The new version will provide one role-based view and flow, as well as one place to manage all Kaseya relationships such as rep contact info, currently licensed products and up-to-date information on alerts and quick-fix engineering items. The company also reiterated its commitment to maintaining an open platform that connects to any PSA provider like ConnectWise or Autotask.
Kaseya unveiled a new ticketing dashboard with a design geared toward letting non-technical users navigate the interface with ease. It utilizes what the company calls a Google material design, heavy on icons, colors and shapes to simplify the user experience (UX). Clients can see a ticket history, a listing of all open tickets and the option to route to a PSA or a service desk for ticket submittal depending on the platforms utilized.
In the third quarter of this year, Kaseya will release some functionality that got big applause from the audience. One such improvement is the ability to maintain remote sessions even after a loss of connectivity. When techs have to remotely reboot a machine, they can now reconnect automatically without having to open or close another remote session.
The OEM partnership and subsequent merger with BDR provider Unitrends was a big topic of conversation this year, and an integral part of the future strategy outlined at Connect this year. According to Kaseya, “this is not your mama’s file and folder backup,” but an appliance that lives in the customer network that automatically replicates to the cloud. The platform allows techs to easily search across backups to pick a restore point, and incorporates recovery insurance to make sure backups are verified and working properly. The Unitrends MSP portal is built as a live dashboard with aggregated data and alerts from every appliance partners manage integrated into the PSA to provide detailed reporting without the need for network traversal.
To help offset the revenue loss from Microsoft Office licenses, Kaseya announced a new partnership with Office 365 backup provider Spanning. According to Kaseya’s research, 87 percent of MSPs support Office 365, which has grown to 120 billion users in just a few years. There is real revenue potential in moving upstream in Office 365-related services, particularly in backing up tools like OneDrive, SharePoint and mail. The flexibility offered by Spanning helps mitigate time-consuming processes for techs like trying to get backups of user accounts older than 30 days, find missing files or circumventing incorrect retention policies per user. There’s also a self-service capability that lets end users log in to search for missing data.The backups are housed in Spanning’s AWS-powered cloud, so MSPs don’t have to buy extra storage for gigabytes wroth of mail and files.
More than 1,000 MSPs use Kaseya’s business management solution (BMS) platform, which received some upgrades this year such as automatic ticket deduplication, automatic ticket close and automatic ticket reopen. The goal is to avoid generation of new tickets upon existing ones, making sure the problem is addressed by the same tech every time. Technicians can close and reopen tickets in the same system, reiterating Kaseya’s commitment to shave minutes off of tech’s task execution everywhere it can. The assets are synced between BMS and VSA, its RMM solution, integrating data from the two systems.
This summer, Kaseya will release an integration with Active Directory, allowing users to maintain the same login credentials for their IT ticketing portal as they use to log in to their device. Each user’s portal into VSA products will use the same credentials, hopefully reducing the amount of calls techs receive for password resets or submitting tickets via phone or live chat.
This summer, Kaseya will release an integration with Active Directory, allowing users to maintain the same login credentials for their IT ticketing portal as they use to log in to their device. Each user’s portal into VSA products will use the same credentials, hopefully reducing the amount of calls techs receive for password resets or submitting tickets via phone or live chat.
If there was a single message coming out of Kaseya’s 2018 road map presented at Kaseya Connect this year, it was the critical nature of increasing technician efficiency.
Kaseya profits the more it can help partners deepen customer relationships, drive recurring revenue, generate higher margins — all by unlocking efficiencies to get a revenue uplift. The “boots on the ground” techs don’t care about specific products; they just want to get through their task list. Between managing endpoints, monitoring the network, implementing backup and disaster recovery (BDR), managing cloud applications like Office 365 and deploying PSA functions to manage the customer relationship, techs have a tendency to view these different task domains as isolated functions operating in a vacuum.
The road map outlined this year is all about erasing those “artificial divisions” and providing as much functionality under one umbrella as possible.
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