The managed services trend has become a beacon of revenue light in the economic storm and those already in the game are travelling well. TREVOR CLARKE caught up with Kaseya president, Mark Sutherland, and CEO, Gerald Blackie, to talk about the vendors plans for the market and the possibility of picking up smaller companies.
What are the plans coming to Australia and what do you hope to achieve while you are here?
Gerald Blackie (GB): We are looking to continue our growth down here. We are proud of the fact that Tim [Dickinson, country manager] and the team have done a tremendous job in building our presence. We are in the process of growing our MSP [managed services platform] business and beginning the process of growing our enterprise business at the same time. We are in advance of a number of new initiatives being announced at our user conference, but part of the process is understanding what people are doing here.
One of the growth areas in the market despite the economic climate is managed services. We have all seen the move from CapEx to OpEx and it is a pretty well known story, how do you see what is happening overseas as compared to Australia on this?
GB: It is pretty much the same, particularly in the Western world. Australia and New Zealand are very much up there with the US and Canada. Some of the European countries have adopted it fairly early, like the Netherlands. But there are countries like France and Germany that are not there at all yet. If I look at the Australian market, everything I see that is going on in managed services, it is exactly in parallel with what we see in the US.
Are there any market segments you see having more uptake than others?
GB: On the enterprise side, we tend to focus a lot on things like higher-end healthcare and there are a number of verticals we do well in even with the downturn in the economy we have experienced both here and around the world. But the core area we play in today is IT service providers and they are our number one vertical. If you take the enterprise aside and just look at IT service providers that is a vertical in itself, even though IT is fairly horizontal. And how they move from break/fix into people-oriented IT in that small to medium enterprise space, without managed services they are struggling. If they are deep into managed services now, or doing IT automation in a way that we would suggest they do it, the results have been stellar. They are making great profits and we have so many examples of customers that have written to us and said, without managed services they would be in deep trouble.
