News in the Channel - issue #18

INTERVIEW – GREG JONES, KASEYA

conduct business with their customers. Again, this desire came up from partners and we've listened to them and acted on it. “We've also introduced catastrophic loss prevention into our Partner First Pledge. That means that if any MSP that does business with Kaseya or Datto loses a customer that represents 20% or more of their revenue, we will forego those contracts with the MSP, we'll cancel them down or move the spend, whatever is required. “We don’t just look at it from a lens of ‘does it make sense for Kaseya?’ Everything we're doing now is ‘does this look right from the lens of the MSP? Is this helping them grow?’ Because if we're saying we're truly MSP- centric, everything that we do from a business perspective needs to represent that. If they grow, there's a direct correlation with our success as well.” Flexible friends As part of the pledge, Kaseya has also introduced Flex Spend. “Flex Spend is across all our products,” says Greg. “It allows partners to reallocate their spend within our backup suites to all the solutions. Again, this was a concern voiced by MSPs. We offer many different backup solutions, some on premise, some in the cloud. “For instance, many SMBs are changing their networks. Some are on premise, some are hybrid – a combination of the cloud and on premise – and some are solely in the cloud. The problem for many MSPs was they couldn't pitch and sell solutions on one-, three- or five-year contracts because they didn't know where the estate was going to be in three months, let alone a year. So we decided to be flexible around the spend. For example, if they sign a contract for a year or three years or whatever, we will allow them to move that spend to either a cloud or physical solution and switch between the two.” Finally, there is a price lock guarantee. “For any business that signs a contract with Kaseya or Datto, we guarantee that we will never increase the rates during that period beyond 5%,” he says. “That is based upon inflation and costs. But you're not going to see any huge price spikes from us like you do with some other vendors in the market. We see up to a

26% increase in some cases from the start of a contract to the end and one-off spikes of 15% occur quite regularly in the marketplace. “That guarantee is a huge stake in the ground for us. That's part of the evolution of Datto and Kaseya coming together. When we made the acquisition, Fred Voccola said to staff and external partners that the deal was not about chopping companies up, it was about taking the best of Kaseya and Datto and putting them together and making it the best organisation out there for the whole MSP and SMB community.” Greg adds that there have been plenty of other changes within the business. “For instance, we've revamped our global partner programme for 2024 and 2025,” he says. “We have reversed engineered it based on what MSPs want. We've took the most recent reports that Kaseya and Datto do on the state of the industry and looked at the top challenges, what their concerns are and what they are struggling with and then built the partner programme based on what they need to win new business.” AI impact One particular area of concern and interest for MSPs is artificial intelligence (AI), and Kaseya has been keen to that. “We're seeing a lot of SMBs going to MSPs to ask for help and support around AI, machine learning and automation,” says Greg. “Many businesses are realising that they can

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The problem

for many MSPs was they couldn't pitch and sell solutions on one-, three- or five- year contracts because they didn't know where the estate was going to be in three months, let alone a year.

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