Good afternoon, SMB Nation Community! I was recently able to meet with Kaseya’s Chief Marketing Officer, Loren Jarrett (pictured). Loren took the time
Loren started our call by introducing me to the “new Kaseya.” As many of you are aware, this company announced the appointment of Yogesh Gupta as CEO in June, 2013. With this appointment came an updating of the executive team; Loren herself was recently appointed as the company’s CMO. Additional appointments included: Prakash Khot as CTO (recently of Salesforce), Mark Combs as COO and Brian Murphy as CSO. All of these team members bring years of experience in the IT industry.
This new team has moved from traditional “waterfall” software development to Agile Development, which allows the Kaseya team to streamline the update and release solutions to its customers. Loren said that Kaseya is expecting to release three Agile-fed updates in 2014. The first of which was released in January of 2014, and was the Kaseya Virtual Administrator, v. 6.5 (VSA). This is the company’s core platform, on which many of its customers rely to conduct business. Version 6.5 has support for Windows 8.1 as well as Windows Server 2012, and can accept 3rd party integrations. Loren also let me know that the company currently has a Kaseya Network Monitor in beta, expected to be added to the VSA later this year.
“It’s heartening to see such results [from this process],” Loren said in our interview.
When it came to 2013’s growth, Loren said that Kaseya has been seeing a lot of the same trends as you. In particular, the Cloud and Mobility (BYOD) are on the rise, and the challenges are shifting, particularly with BYOD, where the main challenge is to keep data safe while protecting the end user’s privacy.
Kaseya has been seeing these growing trends manifested in a large increase in the number of clients adopting the SaaS version of its products. In addition, the company has shown strong growth in a 50% increase of subscription bookings year over year, as well as the addition of 500 new customers globally. 60% of these new customers purchased the SaaS versions of the company’s solutions.
So how did they do it? Beyond the updated management team, Kaseya has been very active in acquiring technology companies that are specifically focused on areas close to their mission. In fact, the company made three major acquisitions in 2013: Rover Apps (now Kaseya BYOD) for BYOD,Zyrion (now Kaseya Traverse) for cloud and network monitoring, and 365 Command for Office 365 management and administration.
Loren then took the time to speak with me a bit about Kaseya’s partner community, particularly as it concerns the SMB IT Pro. She explained that Kaseya is still very channel-focused, and that they still offer both on-premise and SaaS versions of their solutions, to meet their customer’s needs and preferences. She also said that the company’s Reseller Program is a big area of investment for them, and that we should be watching for a brand new, resource-rich Partner Portal to be released later this year.