Kaseya’s Fred Voccola: Enterprise Software Vendor Execs Are 'Desperate, Not Talented'

Enterprise software companies are turning to channel partners in “a sign of desperation,” according to Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola.

A growing number of vendors are embracing a partner-first strategy during the current economic turbulence. Instead of doubling down on a direct strategy and cutting support to the channel, more firms are investing in partners for the long term.

Voccola met with Channel Futures at the Kaseya+Datto M&A Symposium for MSPs in London. The CEO didn’t hold back when asked about enterprise software vendors pivoting to grow their MSP business.

Kaseya's Fred Voccola

He described it as “a sign of desperation for the most part [by] not very talented software executives.”

“They’re desperate because they’re not meeting their growth targets. They were too aggressive in their hiring, and they were irresponsible, and they made stupid financial mistakes that screw over a lot of their employees, which is not fair. It’s bull***t. And they say ‘Oh, we’re going to go and solve it in the MSP space’ and their board members are too stupid to realize that that doesn’t make commercial sense. Everyone’s trying to say, ‘We’re going to have MSPs sell our stuff for us.' It doesn’t work because they can’t use it. It doesn’t work.”

Enterprise Software Vendors Selling 'Overpriced, Overly Complex Products'

The exec maintained that the rate of growth in the mature enterprise space is shrinking. This is leading some players to refocus on the midmarket and SMB, with little knowledge of either market.

Voccola said during his tenure at BMC, “every time in the history of [the company] that they tried to go to the midmarket, they failed because the products weren’t suited to it.”

He said enterprise software vendors “don’t understand that the MSP is the IT arm of the solicitor, the doctor, the law firm, the architect. They’re not reselling them stuff to use. They’re embedding it in their offering for them. And that’s so foreign. And there’s so much more that goes into it."

“They think they’re going to come and sell that overpriced, overly complex product, which is built for a user that does not exist in the MSP space. That’s why they fail when they do it.”

Voccola also believes that most enterprise software vendors “think that MSPs are VARs. They don’t understand how to change from selling their product to an internal IT user to selling their product to a for profit company. [One] that’s making a business of using their product as a part of a larger solution. That’s foreign. And there’s so many things that go into it.”

“A lot of people make a spreadsheet decision. ‘I’ve hired 500 too many people. I’ve laid off 300. I need to find a new source of revenue. Oh, I’ll go to these MSPs, and I’ll spend some money there.’”

Read more from the interview with Voccola on Monday.