Kaseya’s Voccola on Next Version of IT Complete, Automation, AI, 'Stagnant' ConnectWise
The outspoken CEO pulled no punches in his interview with Channel Futures.
April 28, 2023
![Fred Voccola Kaseya Connect Global 2023 2 Fred Voccola Kaseya Connect Global 2023 2](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt4678a8925dc91545/6523fdc9d03b4f2193908b2f/Fred-Voccola-Kaseya-Global-Connect-2023-2.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Channel Futures: So what’s the next thing you’re going to add to IT Complete?
Kaseya’s Fred Voccola: “I don’t know what the next … Well, I do know but I’m not gonna say, very respectfully. What are the next couple of things that we’re gonna add to it? I can tell you the security-threat landscape is always evolving. These bad guys are really smart and they’re really motivated and they make a lot of money doing the crap that they do. So they’re always coming up with new vectors to attack. We need give the kit so our MSPs can stop them.
The cool thing about this MSP market, and the last eight years have been freaking awesome, is the better our customers do, the better we do. If an MSP powered by Kaseya is a great organization that’s selling and growing their business, we will benefit because they have to use our kit to deliver. So we want to make sure that the MSPs powered by Kaseya are the best.”
CF: During your keynote, you talked about an uptick in MSPs’ use of Cooper (an AI engine that helps MSPs get the most our of their Kasaya modules). We’re hearing a lot about AI and automation lately. Are we going to see more of those built into the Kaseya tools and modules?
FV: I’m gonna break the question into two. AI is great, but automation doesn’t need to rely on AI. There’s more automation in our platform than every single competitor out there. The levels of automation in our platform, we call it workflow integrations, make (MSP) engineers 30, 40, 50% more efficient.
A lot of people think, bam, bam, there’s a piece of automation that’s gonna make me not need any technicians anymore. Maybe one day when the sun stops burning that will happen. But where value really gets created is if there are 100 tasks that an engineer does every day and if we can make that 80 tasks, that’s huge. If we can make all 100 tasks take 10 seconds less or 20 seconds less to do, it’s death by a thousand paper cuts. That’s our approach. And that’s why I have so many integrations and so much automation. And we’re so far down the path. I don’t think anyone’s gonna catch it.
CF: How about AI?
FV: You mentioned Cooper. We have a huge investment in AI. We have a team that’s looking at AI and other technologies, machine learning, different types of [algorithms], of how we can leverage force multipliers to increase automation.
I think you’re gonna see a lot of companies making the mistake of saying, “We’re all in on AI” without really understanding what AI is and what it’s not. We know what we’re trying to accomplish. We want to make the technicians’ experience faster, better, easier. Maybe AI becomes the primary driver for it. Maybe it’s just grinding out 5,000 more workflow integrations to make them 30, 40, 50% better. Or maybe it’s both. I don’t know. But I can tell you every single release that we do of our platform, we provide substantially more automation to make our (MSP) engineers better. If AI is an architecture that we’re gonna leverage to do it, or a tool to do it, we’re all over it.
CF: It looks like the rumored ConnectWise sale to Bain is off the table. How will Kaseya take advantage of the company’s stagnation to gain a greater market lead?
FV: ConnectWise, they’re a nice little company. Good company. Jason Magee, their CEO, is a really good guy. That being said, I very respectfully will say ConnectWise has been stagnant for a long time. They’re growing less than 10% a year. We have organic growth over 30% a year. We’re not going to buy ConnectWise. We don’t need to buy them.
I think once they get bought, it’s gonna be tough for ConnectWise’s customers. When a private equity buyer takes you out, look what happens. When Thoma [Bravo] bought ConnectWise, they cut tons of costs, lots of layoffs. Same thing will happen again. It always happens. Account managers leave. We bought Datto; that’s a strategic buy. We invested more in Datto. We didn’t lay anybody off. We piled a ton of money onto it. Customers speak with their pocketbooks. And I think that what we do with IT Complete is we recognize the critical problems that these MSPs have. They need to get their technicians more efficient. They need everything in one place, integrated. And they want to spend less money. You know, ConnectWise has a couple of products. They resell products that can’t really integrate stuff deeply. I think they’re a good company. But there’s a reason that they’re growing slowly.
CF: Is that slow growth the main reason you didn’t want to buy them?
FV: No, we didn’t need to buy them. We really (wouldn’t) get anything for it. That’s not saying they’re not a good company. It’s just, there’s not a strategic fit. They don’t have any technology that we need. Their business is around reselling other people’s products. There’s no IP in that. They have a really good PSA franchise, they have some RMM stuff, and they got a little bit of security stuff that they kind of destroyed when they bought Perch. They just destroyed it. They resell a ton of stuff. They don’t integrate their products and they don’t have a platform. So we don’t need it.
CF: There’s been some chatter lately about a lot of MSPs leaving Datto and going to your competitors. Is that something you’re seen? What’s your take on it?
FV: Numbers are numbers. Our organic growth rate is north of 30%. N-able, they’re a public company and one of our competitors, they’re growing I believe 6% or 7%. ConnectWise is growing 9% to 10%. We’re three times their growth. When we bought Datto their growth rate was struggling. They a public company, so it’s all available. Their growth rate was in the low teens. Now it’s up to over 30% again.
We’re jamming. We’re hiring 3,500 people in the next two years. We hired over 1,000 people in the last year. I don’t mean that in a tough-guy or in a bragging kind of way. It’s just facts. I think a lot of people tend to target the leader, try to gang up on the leader. And it’s OK. We’re happy that they say bad things about us, as long as we keep taking their customers and growing our business faster than them. If they wanna throw stones at us because we’re doing well, fine. If we’re doing well, that means our customers are doing well. And that’s the most important thing.
CF: There’s been some chatter lately about a lot of MSPs leaving Datto and going to your competitors. Is that something you’re seen? What’s your take on it?
FV: Numbers are numbers. Our organic growth rate is north of 30%. N-able, they’re a public company and one of our competitors, they’re growing I believe 6% or 7%. ConnectWise is growing 9% to 10%. We’re three times their growth. When we bought Datto their growth rate was struggling. They a public company, so it’s all available. Their growth rate was in the low teens. Now it’s up to over 30% again.
We’re jamming. We’re hiring 3,500 people in the next two years. We hired over 1,000 people in the last year. I don’t mean that in a tough-guy or in a bragging kind of way. It’s just facts. I think a lot of people tend to target the leader, try to gang up on the leader. And it’s OK. We’re happy that they say bad things about us, as long as we keep taking their customers and growing our business faster than them. If they wanna throw stones at us because we’re doing well, fine. If we’re doing well, that means our customers are doing well. And that’s the most important thing.
KASEYA CONNECT GLOBAL — During his keynote at this week’s Kaseya Connect Global, CEO Fred Voccola talked about the latest modules and improvements that put the 2.0 into IT Complete, Kaseya’s MSP technology platform. MSPs liked what they heard and, naturally, wanted to know what they can expect in version 3.0.
When Channel Futures asked Voccola for some insights into the next version, he joked that he just finished polishing 2.0 and there was no way he was taking about version 3.0. But after we twisted his arm a bit, he ended up sharing some thoughts on the platform’s future, as well as automation, the future of AI, the state of ConnectWise and why the haters chatter about Datto customers leaving Kaseya for its competitors.
(Channel Futures this year named Voccola Influencer of the Year, along with Aryaka’s Craig Patterson.)
Channel Futures: MSPs want to know what to expect in IT Complete 3.0. Can you fill them in?
Kaseya‘s Fred Voccola: So, what’s next? We’re going to keep doubling down on making our MSPs successful. I’m not gonna give you like soundbites. That’s what we do. We put a lot of money behind solving the core problems that structurally hinder MSPs. We’re a software provider. We find our platform and we’re going to make it even better. It’ll be more integrated. My eureka kind of vision is to have one place with every single piece of functionality that an MSP needs at the tip of their fingertips that’s seamlessly integrated. Just like Microsoft Office.
You remember the “Office” productivity wars, right? There was Lotus and Word Perfect. But Microsoft won. The reason they won: Their playbook was pretty simple. Not easy to do, but simple in a contextual understanding: Let’s integrate these products so they all feel like features of one product. So today, if you’re using PowerPoint and you want to put a “table” in it, you right-click “table,” or you just put Excel into PowerPoint. That’s awesome. The same spellcheck works across all of the modules of Office. It’s crazy to think about.
So Microsoft builds it all into one and makes sure it has everything in it. And Office has continued to expand. It now has Teams because people need collaboration software, it has One Note, it has a browser. Everything you need is in Office. And they charge a fraction for [new features]. If you go back to 1998 and you bought Word Perfect, Lotus and Harvard Graphics, you’re gonna pay four times what you’d pay for Office, where you got everything together. And Office worked better together.
So our vision – where we’re gonna get with IT Complete 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 – is it’ll always be “complete.” We have to make sure that when our MSPs want another type of functionality, we have it in that system. That’s why we bought Vonahi [Security, a maker of an automated network pentesting platform that evaluates risks in real-time]. That’s why we bought audIT (a sales presentation tool). And we’ll continue to do that. That’s why I bought Datto, etc.
Second thing is, we are gonna make them even more and more integrated, so it acts and seems like one. Every single module on our platform has a common look and feel. And then we’re gonna do everything in our power to keep lowering our prices. We’re a third to a half less expensive than if someone went and bought 17 products from 17 people.
Every dollar that an MSP spends on software is a dollar less of profit they make. That’s simple. And we want MSPs powered by Kaseya to be the best. And that means they deliver the best service and they make the most money. That’s our mission. So that’s what we’ll keep doing time and time again.
See our slideshow above for the rest of our conversation with Voccola. He goes more in-depth on IT Complete, automation and a “stagnant” ConnectWise.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Jeff O’Heir or connect with him on LinkedIn. |
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