Dermot McCann (Kaseya)
As the demand heats up for security and IT services in the Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) market, so is Kaseya’s plans to continue to double down on its strategy and ramp up investment.
Kaseya senior vice president and general manager for Asia Pacific (APAC) Dermot McCann highlighted plans to hire an additional 150 staff on top of its 140-strong combined team and bring its RocketCyber managed security operations centre to Australia. New Zealand is also top of mind for Kaseya, recognising its growing team.
“We're continuing to double down on our strategy and continuing to invest,” McCann said.
“We have a unique proposition for the channel, as they are delivering more IT and security services to their customers, they're getting more demand on their time and resources. It's a perfect storm and feels like we're in the right place at the right time.”
Since its acquisition of Datto earlier this year in May, McCann said the teams have come together to create a great culture, working on common goals and objectives, as well as working with partners to strengthen those relationships.
This was particularly highlighted in investing further into the Datto market development funds (MDF) program and hiring Dan Tomaszewski as Kaseya's new executive vice president for channel.
McCann emphasised its strategy can be articulated in four different areas: helping to reduce vendor fatigue; technical integration of various tools acquired; making the most out of its IT Complete platform; and investing into its partner engagement.
“We think the average MSP [managed services provider] has about 17 different vendors, which means they have 17 different account managers, different licensing agreements, support calls, training, certification, webinars, events to attend, etc.,” he said. “Our strategy is to reduce that amount and we do that by commercially integrating all of those vendors into our IT Complete platform.
“We continue to invest in all these brands within Kaseya across all the product sets — Datto [and] IT Glue — which have impressive roadmaps and significant investment but under the hood, a lot of the effort is going into technical integration to make them more efficient to drive more automation.”
McCann said one of the challenges for MSPs in dealing with multiple vendors is in the inability to utilise most of the features and tools that come with certain platforms. To address this challenge, Kaseya launched its Cooper artificial intelligence (AI) engine to help drive better utlilisation of its IT Complete platform.
“It's really focused on making sure that our partners are leveraging all the benefits and the insights that IT Complete can drive,” he said.
“Ensuring that you've got multi-factor authentication turned on, leveraging single sign-on across all your tools, providing all the security recommendations and highlighting new features we think are really going to enhance your experience being a Kaseya partner.
“There’s a lot of investment from Kaseya to make sure our products and solutions within the IT Complete suite are normally priced correctly and positioned in a way that's going to drive significant margin improvement for our partners. That's been a significant development for us as our strategy continues to evolve.”
One sweet spot in the market for partners is around security compliance and reporting tools.
“It's an area where we see this massive continuous growth in compliance reporting, but what we're finding for our partners is when they embrace compliance reporting with their customers, it's the thin edge of the wedge in offering a broad range of cybersecurity services to their customers,” he added.
