Kaseya's Unitrends Buy Sets Up Showdown with Autotask-Datto

**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting merger and acquisition news from March.**

Consolidation continues to reshape the IT channel as managed service providers’ (MSPs) favorite vendors band together. Seven months after Datto rocked the industry by agreeing to merge with Autotask, another MSP management software powerhouse has joined forces with a leading backup and business continuity provider.

Kaseya on Thursday announced a merger with Unitrends, a move that gives partners a one-stop shop for a slew of critical IT solutions, including remote monitoring and management (RMM), endpoint management, network monitoring and management (NMM), professional services automation (PSA), IT service desk, security, and backup and disaster recovery.

Kaseya’s Fred Voccola

In March, the two providers integrated their capabilities with the launch of Kaseya Unified Backup (KUB), an appliance-based BDR solution built on Unitrends technology. Evidently, both companies were pleased with how smoothly the partnership unrolled and judged that they could accomplish even greater things as one entity.

“We’ve had a long-standing, collaborative relationship with Unitrends as a result of both companies being a part of the Insight Venture Partners portfolio,” Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola told Channel Partners. “We saw the opportunity for this deal as we worked together on Kaseya Unified Backup – which began over a year ago – and were amazed by our customers’ response in rapidly adopting the product. As a result, we accelerated our plans to merge with Unitrends.”

There’s a lot about the two providers that’s complementary. The managed-services market is an extremely lucrative opportunity that Unitrends had already started to move on by forming Unitrends MSP a few months ago, a wholly owned subsidiary dedicated to providing managed BDR and DRaaS solutions. The merger gives Unitrends a ready-made MSP customer base to accelerate those efforts.

Conversely, Kaseya gets to capitalize on Unitrends’ expansive midmarket reach, and bringing a BDR solution into its portfolio takes it one step closer to its goal of offering a comprehensive suite of critical IT products.

“Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) is an evolving market for the channel and MSPs,” said Voccola. “As a critical solution that all MSPs must have, the timing was right to expand the Kaseya IT Complete platform to include BCDR, and Unitrends is the leader in providing these solutions.”

Voccola says by joining forces, the two companies gain entry to new markets both by leveraging one another’s existing capabilities and customers and by combining their talent. They’ve already learned to work together closely over the last year while developing KUB, and Voccola says we should expect more great things from the new combined team.

Both companies are owned by private equity firm Insight Venture Partners and will continue to operate under their own brands. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.