Voccola Addresses Datto Acquisition, Partners React at Kaseya Connect IT Global

KASEYA CONNECT IT GLOBAL — Day two of Kaseya’s Connect IT Global 2022 event in Las Vegas began with another rousing keynote from CEO Fred Voccola. Voccola covered a range of topics, focusing on the state of the MSP and SMB industry, and what this means for Kaseya and its different business units.

“SMBs are driving everything,” said Voccola (pictured above). “They are shaking up the big boys. Business scales faster in today’s world, and SMBs have transformed into a new operating model. COVID accelerated this, of course, so now more than ever, there’s a right place and time element to this. Business applications are transforming the SMB — they’ve become mission-critical. That means they need to work, and they need to be secure. Organizations are requiring enterprise-class business applications. And the people in this room are the ones who do it.”

Voccola also pointed out that budgets these days aren’t keeping up with demand. Partners are feeling the pinch, meaning they have to do more with less. The burden is on these already overworked, and overlooked IT professionals. 

So what’s the solve? Automation, right? Yes, technician efficiency means automation, which goes hand in hand with integration. But integration is … not easy.

This is the reality in a heterogeneous software environment. Most integrations are difficult and don’t end up working. It’s hard to build something meaningful enough that overcomes the challenges that both parties have.

Compliance Is Coming

Another challenge, according to Voccola, is compliance. This is a big one, or at least is becoming a big one. 

“This is the next big thing on the horizon for everyone, but definitely for the SMB,” said Voccola. “The standards coming down the pike have teeth. One of the biggest forms of this will be cyber insurance policy claims.”

Voccola mentioned that soon, customers will be able to use Kaseya’s Compliance Manager service solution for this. 

Mergers, and One Very Specific Acquisition

Kaseya exists to solve the aforementioned challenges for partners, said Voccola. One of the ways it has done this is to acquire companies with the capabilities to do just that. Being one intelligent engine and one source of integration is Kaseya’s company strategy, according to Voccola. And, Kaseya has made a lot of acquisitions to get there. One such notable acquisition is, of course, Datto, which Channel Futures covered extensively when the announcement broke.

“No company on this planet can be organically competent — that is to say, no one has all of the knowledge/expertise in the areas of security, compliance, RMM, backup, etc.,” said Voccola in his keynote. “Those are complicated areas. So we buy companies that have expertise in those areas, with industry-leading products, and integrate those into our platform. We make them workflow-integrated; we now make them intelligent, and we lower the price for them. We’ve done that with every deal we’ve made. There is no difference in why we’re buying Datto. It’s the same strategy. Datto will make us more complete and commercially integrated. Datto has amazing technologies that we are going to integrate into our platform.”

According to Voccola, the goal is to continue to solve the same problems; Datto just happens to be …