Kaseya's New CEO: Who is Fred Voccola?

Kaseya this week announced that Fred Voccola will take the helm of the remote monitoring and management company as Yogesh Gupta moves into the chairman role. So just who is Fred Voccola, and where does he plan to take Kaseya next? We caught up with him during his first official week on the job, and have the details here.

But first, a bit of background. Gupta has served as CEO of RMM provider Kaseya for the past two years, taking the job when the company was acquired by private equity firm Insight Venture Partners. Gupta’s focus has been on making the product great, and he delivered on many milestones for the company during his time leading the organization.

Voccola’s approach will build on what’s been accomplished, adding the front-end communications, sales and community approach to the overall platform and approach to Kaseya customers.

Is Kaseya an enterprise company or an MSP company?

And just who are those customers? They are more MSP than enterprise, Voccola told me.

“People wonder if we are enterprise. Our primary market is MSPs.”

And Voccola signaled a shift in tone and approach in terms of how Kaseya will approach that primary market.

“Kaseya has lost its way a little bit with the MSP market,” Voccola said. Kaseya’s new CEO said that the company has invested more than $20 million in product R&D over the last two years, but hasn’t promoted the improvements.

Voccola’s vision

Voccola envisions a new Kaseya that is easy for MSPs to do business with — a marketing community, he told me. “The company has made and will continue to make a substantial investment in our customer success model. We want to make sure all our customers are successful…This will be a full court blitz, not just in marketing, but in our community.”

I asked Voccola what companies out there are doing this well already.

“Salesforce.com is a model of success for the customer success model,” he said. He also pointed to his own former employer Yodle and another company called Splunk as examples of organizations that have done an exemplary job of implementing a customer success and marketing community model.

Customer success model is the key

To jump start the effort at Kaseya, Voccola said the company created a customer success organization about a month ago with the goal of becoming a thought leader in the customer success industry.

“It starts with a great product that is customer-focused,” he said. And then you create a great ecosystem with industry experts and subject matter experts. Voccola said he wants engineers to smile when they hear the word Kaseya, and then want to take Kaseya with them when they move to other companies.

So what else is in the pipeline? Well, it’s early days, but Voccola promised more soon.

“This company has great people and we have an awesome customer base,” Voccola said. “I’m looking forward to working with the team to continue to build an organization that everybody is proud to be a part of – making everybody happy and successful.”