Live from DattoCon 2024 in Miami, Erick and Rich discuss the new Kaseya 365 User security solution and three hiring practices that will set new employees up for long-term success. Then they’re joined by Mike Puglia, the general manager of Kaseya’s security suite, to talk some more about Kaseya 365 User, the new DNS and web filtering features in Kaseya 365 Endpoint, AI, and more. And finally, one last thing: an oddly satisfying Halloween tradition from Stillwater, Minn., that involves dropping one-ton pumpkins from a 100-foot crane.

Discussed in this episode:

Bonus Video Post: Kaseya 365 Does User Security Now Too

Oddly satisfying video of the Stillwater Harvest Fest pumpkin drop

 

Transcript:

10-30-24 MSP Chat Episode 38

Rich: [00:00:00] Blast off, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome another episode of the MSP chat podcast, your weekly visit with two talking heads, talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need. To make it big and manage services. My name is rick freeman I’m chief content officer and channel analyst at channel mastered the organization responsible for the show I am joined as I am every week But this week live and side by your other co host Erick simpson our chief strategist at channel mastered Erick How’s it going?

Erick: It’s

going great rich.

Let everybody know where we happen to be today at together For the first time in a minute

Rich: We are at DattoCon 2024 specifically We are at the fountain blue hotel in miami in the podcast room that the good folks that can say, I have set aside, but this week we are attending to say as data con 2024 event where there are a lot of people and a lot of things going on, a lot of

Erick: people, a lot of people, and a lot of things going on and a lot of announcements, rich.

Rich: Yeah, absolutely. And with that, let’s just dive right into the story of the week. It’s the biggest announcement to come out of the show, but you’re right, there are a lot of others as well. But let’s turn the clock back briefly to the Kaseya Connect show at the the end of April.

There was huge news coming out of that show when Kaseya announced the launch of something they were calling Kaseya 360. Or 365, which was an end point focused package of services for MSPs. RMM, EDR, endpoint backup, all the services that you need as an MSP to support endpoints for your customers.

The big news some months later here at DattoCon is another SKU of Kaseya 365. This one is called Kaseya 365 user. So the one that they rolled out in April is now officially. Caseya 365 endpoint. It is joined, and what I think we have to call the Caseya 365 family at this point, by Caseya 365 user, which is a user focused Security package.

And so you’re going to get SaaS backup in there. You’re going to get anti phishing, you’re going to get dark web monitoring you’re going to get security awareness training and you’re going to get what Kaseya calls cloud detection and response. So think SaaS security. That piece of Kaseya 365 user.

Is based on technology that Kaseya acquired along with SaaSAlerts. And we’ve spoken on this show before. I’ve certainly written at my blog, ChannelHolic, many times about SaaSAlerts. One of the surprisingly few pure play SaaS security vendors out there with an MSP orientation. They are now part of Kaseya.

Their technology is bundled into Kaseya 365 user at no additional cost. Which saying something Erick, because the cost of Kaseya 365 user, if you consider everything that I just listed that’s in there, like Kaseya 365 Endpoint, which was crazy cheap, 3. 99 for the whole bundle, 1. 75 if you exclude the MDR, Kaseya 365 user is coming in at a promotional price of 2.

79 per user per month. That is a promotional price at some unspecified point down the road. The price goes up. It goes up to 3. 75 per user per month. 3. 75 for all those technologies that I talked about. And I need to point out that at the show in the spring, Kaseya, Announce what they’re calling their partner.

First pledge. There are a lot of pieces to that, but one of the pieces to that is there are limits. There’s a hard cap basically on how much to say is allowed to raise prices. On these Kaseya 365 solutions. They cannot, will not raise the price during a contract term. At the end of the term, all they can do is inflation plus 5%.

They don’t have to do that. That’s the maximum that they are allowed to do. These are very cost effective, affordable solutions right now that will remain cost effective and and affordable down the road. And yet, yet again disruptive pricing from Kaseya in a a package of services that are really core to what MSPs do for their clients.

Erick: It’s very disruptive, Rich. And very strategic. When you think about the brand IT complete, what they’re trying to do is fulfill that name. They’re trying to include everything that a typical MSP would walk to bundle and deliver to their clients from an [00:05:00] endpoint perspective and from a user perspective.

And remember, they also included DNS and web filtering in. With that Kaseya 365 user license.

Rich: That’s actually something that they added to Kaseya 365 endpoint but at no extra cost, the 399 that stays the same, but you also get DNS and web filtering

Erick: now. So what was very striking to me as I sat through the same presentation you did, and then I sat in a deeper dive of all the different solutions was this idea that for.

Less than 10 bucks a user, eight bucks a user, maybe seven bucks a year, depending on what, where you come in your cost to cover the basics from a security perspective and from a endpoint management perspective, and then layering on top of that, some of the AI news that they dropped today, which makes it much more efficient.

And lessens the cost of labor for technicians and reducing errors and doing things from an automated fashion. It’s mind boggling. Now, when we hear Fred Vokola say that, their mission, which is to increase the profit of MSPs to as close to 35 percent as possible, when the statistics that he shared today reflected that.

In general, the average gross profit margin of MSPs is about 10 percent when you compare it to like attorneys that are getting 40 percent or accountants that are getting 30%. So this gives MSPs a leg up and a fighting chance to really compete and then cover all those basic needs for their costs being, eight bucks or so per user with everything in there.

And then to increase that Margin for what they ultimately build our client for and then focus on more strategic initiatives to help clients grow their business strategically. So amazing information, amazing news. And then the acquisition of SAS alerts was also the October surprise, if you will.

Rich: Yeah. And I want to quickly talk about the AI piece of that because when Kaseya 365 endpoint came out in April, They were really to say it was really focused about the pricing. That was the story around that. And the the profit opportunity that opened up for MSPs, they really didn’t talk they mentioned, they certainly, didn’t hide the fact that there was AI and automation built into that, but it wasn’t foregrounded the way AI and automation have been with cause say a three 65 user.

And I, I interviewed Fred Vokola yesterday and I understand why that is a little bit now. And Kaseya itself has been a little bit surprised by the degree to which MSPs Have adopted embraced. And in their words, the MSP words benefited from the AI and automation technology that Kaseya has introduced so much.

So that, that the vision that they sketched out in April around the Kaseya 365 family was, yeah, the average MSP. Is doing 10 percent margins now. We believe that there’s on this four step plan that’s probably got another year to go. And when we’re at the end of that, those four steps will get them up to 35%.

When I spoke to Fred McCullough yesterday, he said, based on what we’re seeing around AI and automation right now, We actually think that by the end of the decade we can get MSPs to 40 or 50 percent margins. So they’ve upped their target and their optimism about what they can accomplish based based around AI, which is interesting.

Erick: When I saw the integration with AI and some of the tools, including IT glue and RMM and things like that, just that level and just like the first in, my words, toe in the water. Yeah. Of the AI capabilities that they are releasing now it’s apparent that it’s going to save technicians and MSPs a ton of labor because the RMM knows where everything is and it glue can do this discovery and then and then take over.

And do activities and add things and document things in a way that I’ve never seen before. So yes, AI can be used for the purposes of good. And I think Kaseya sees that and is putting it in a place to give their partners an advantage.

Rich: So that is a long term strategy for Kaseya, which is a lovely segue to your tip of the week, which has to do with hiring and the long term.

Erick: Yes. And actually, I’m the tip of the week is based on a panel that [00:10:00] I did with Travis Britton and Jason Eshelman yesterday during Autotask Community Live. And it was all around hiring strategies for long term success for MSPs, Rich. And, I’ll just share three tips that I shared yesterday.

MSPs are challenged from a scalability perspective, obviously from a profitability perspective and getting the most efficiency out of their teams and also reducing churn and reducing burnout and making sure that we get the right folks in the right seats on the bus during hiring, but then of course, afterwards, how do we, reward them and keep them engaged and things like that, but I’m just going to talk about.

The hiring process itself. So the first tip is having every single role in the organization, whether it is filled today or not, that the organization predicts it will need to grow. So imagine today, you’ve got a team of 10 folks and everybody’s wearing five hats. So where are those hats in the org chart?

That when we can get to the point of maturity that we can hire somebody to take on that role What is that role? What are the requirements for that role? What is the compensation? And how is that role’s performance measured? So that gives the existing staff an idea of where they can grow in the organization kind of a succession strategy.

That’s apparent What they need to do to upskill to compete for that role and then how they’ll be compensated And it also allows new prospective applicants for a job at that MSP to see that there is a plan for growth for the organization and to see that there is a future for them as well. So it gives them a competitive edge during the hiring process that way.

Number two, I’m a DISC certified. I guess you could say behavioral analyst. I’ve been using disc. It’s a behavioral assessment tool like Myers Briggs, like strength finders and I use it to help our clients during the hiring process, but also for team building and what it does assesses how a person is naturally wired.

So how do I behave when I’m not at work? And then how do I subconsciously adapt my behavior to do my work role? And when our natural wiring, our comfort zone matches very closely with what our job role requires. I’m a much happier person, right? I don’t have a lot of mental fatigue. I’m in my sweet spot, right?

I enjoy what I’m doing more because I’m good at it. It’s what I’m comfortable doing. When someone is whose job role is far apart from their natural behavioral style, that’s what we call their adapted behavior. then subconsciously we adapt. It’s not something that most people are aware of unless they’ve been trained and can see this.

But what happens is When you’re doing something that you’re not comfortable doing a lot, right? Tends to slip to the last thing on your to do list. You do it probably not with all the gusto and heart that you normally would. And it’s mentally fatiguing. We’ve all done that once in a while.

Like I remember, helping friends move ah, I can’t take it. I don’t like it, but they’re my friends, so I’m going to do it. But boy after I do that i’m just fatigued i’m mentally fatigued not physically, right? So same thing happens in the work world. So the idea here is that when you’re hiring Implement a behavioral Assessment of some sort that allows you to gauge what that applicant’s natural comfort zone is and make sure that the Position that they are applying for matches closely And if not, is there another role in the organization that would fit them better now?

This works two ways rich it works when you’re hiring, but also works for Existing team members. So I do a lot of this when we’re doing team building. We assess the entire organization and i’m looking first for Folks that are adapting way outside of their comfort zone to say, Hey, how was their performance?

If it’s, erratic, it’s because they’re attempting to do the role and they’re getting fatigued and the performance suffers a little bit. So I look out for that and then I make suggestions. Can we have them move to another seat on the bus that more closely aligns with that? And it’s really successful at that point.

So use behavioral assessment tools. Number two, number three. What is the onboarding strategy for a new employee? When we onboard new customers, right? We have a checklist. We know what to expect the first week, the second week, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, and then things like that. [00:15:00] We need to have the same thing for new employees.

What are the expectations? What do they need to do? And what do we need to do to make them successful the first 30 days? The next 30 days and the final 30 days that probationary period we’re going to do everything we can to make sure that We that the new us higher understands their role What they’re expected to do during this period of time and how we’re going to measure it at the end of that time To make sure that we can then employee orientation and things like that, understanding infrastructures and documentation, our PSA, our ticketing system, and all that.

So that is really critical. So many times, rich, I’ve seen folks just hire folks and just we’re going with a client right now, rich, who in fact, just basically says, Oh, our onboarding press, we have them sit with four different people for a week at a time and watch what they do, right? And probably could do some improvement in that strategy.

Rich: So three, three quick thoughts. I like all of that there. And it, it all kind of calls thoughts to mind. And first of all, every, I hope every MSP in our audience appreciates the importance of getting onboarding right with the client. And they know that if you get that you’re setting yourself up for a long term success with that client.

If you screw it up, you’re really, Setting yourself up or making it difficult to forge a long term relationship. So it makes perfect sense and really should make intuitive sense to the MSPs in our audience. You have to think the same way about your employees. Onboarding is critical. The part about avoiding friction in the role and aligning the personality type of the role, it called to mind a book I read it’s gotta be a couple of decades ago now but it was called First Break All the Rules, I don’t know if you remember this, but I loved it at the time because it was based on this massive poll that the Gallup organization did to study what works and doesn’t work in hiring.

And I’m a numbers guy. So I was all over this. This was not just genErick business advice. This there was data behind this. And one of the key things they found is that Companies that hire really well for a long term success align the person to the role. And and it’s very simple stuff.

And some examples, you don’t want to put an introvert into a sales role. If you’re going to be dealing with people all day long, that’s going to be exhausting. Whereas maybe an introvert is perfect for a security analyst kind of role where they’re off on their own and they’re doing so getting that alignment.

Absolutely critical not just for MSPs, but for everyone and then last but not least. I really like that first piece of advice because in the past when I’ve written about the characteristics that very successful high growth MSPs have in common. One of those characteristics is they built the business to grow from the get go.

So they started out as one person, two, three people, and only a handful of client, but in, they’re choosing an RMM system, they’re not going to buy something small. They’re going to buy something that will grow with them and building an org chart in that way, anticipating growth and setting yourself up for that.

Even if it’s not going to happen. Yeah. Next month or within the next six months, it’s a really smart thing. And it accelerates growth for the companies that are on that

Erick: path. Yeah. So many thoughts here, but I want to keep it, brief. It also helps you to establish milestones to justify when you need to hire that next person.

Like sometimes, we have that conversation with MSPs and say do I need to hire another technician first or a salesperson first? So it gives you the ability to visualize that and to set some milestones and then adjust them Of course over time the second thought that I have is, when we’re when we first do that hiring and we’re aligning that new person into that role Some things that I find happen over time rich and i’m going to call it Roll drift, I call it scope creep and scope c, but this kind of roll drift like oh You I was hired to do this role, right?

And you talk to somebody that’s been there for three or four years and now I’m doing all these other things, right? So it’s really important to keep that in mind when you’re, when you just need somebody to come and tag in and help that friend move, don’t make that their full time job because that’s not what they, you were hired to do.

Just keep that in mind and make sure that anything that you add someone to or promote them into help, maintains that alignment with their natural behavior.

Rich: Look we are at DattoCon 2024. Kaseya365user is the big news from DattoCon 2024. Guess what we have got?

Mike Pulia our interview guest is Mike Pulia. He runs the security product suite at Kaseya. He’s going to be with us in just a moment on the other side of the break to talk about Kaseya365user and all sorts of other good things security related. Stick around folks. We. Are going to be right back

And welcome to part two of this [00:20:00] episode of the msp chat podcast our spotlight interview segment where we are live at datacom 24 and very pleased to be joined by the general manager of the security suite at kaseya mike bullion mike. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me guys I’ve been patting myself on the back all day here because we scheduled this interview well in advance before we knew what the big news would be from the show here.

I had a hunch it would be security related. And I was exactly right. So you are the perfect person to have on the show. Now, for folks who have not met you before, just give them a little idea of who you are and what you do at Kaseya. Sure.

Mike: I’ve been at Kaseya for 11 years now and counting. I’m the general manager of all of our security products.

I’ve worn many hats over those 11 years. We’ve gone from 300 people to 6, 000 people in 11 years. Prior to that, I worked at Salesforce. com and a number of other security companies. I want to tell you how long ago that was.

Rich: So the big news obviously today was the introduction of Kaseya 365 user. And I want to just test a proposition out with you because I’m of the mind increasingly that user security, cloud security and security in general are all becoming increasingly synonymous that the biggest security challenge MSPs deal with.

Are cloud related and user related challenges. Is that the view from Kaseya as well?

Mike: I think they are. If you look at whether it’s cloud or user security, which gets into email and Microsoft 365 and Google, you have something that’s available 24 7 from anywhere in the world to reach all of your employees.

And essentially that’s usually the front door on the way they get in. You have to make it accessible to everyone, but you have to do your best to keep the bad guys out.

Erick: Now we heard Fred, at this conference and last year as well, talking about how, Kaseya is on a mission to help increase the profitability of its MSP partners and its partners overall, Kaseya365 user is very low priced.

How much of a factor did cost come into the conversation in terms of increasing adoption by your partners as well as by their end customers? I think it’s a big part of it.

Mike: You saw this revolution. In productivity software, back when it was office before three 65, if you’re old, like me, I used to buy a copy of word and maybe a copy of Lotus one, two, three, because I’m from Boston.

And they fundamentally changed how productivity software was consumed. Why do I need 25 different products from potentially different vendors? We are much larger here, which I mentioned earlier on the amount of buying power we have to lower our cogs. Is significantly different at the size scale.

We’re at now than when we were 300, 300 people. With one office down the street here in Miami, and now we have buildings and that allows us to pass that on. It makes it easier for our MSPs to say, this is how much I’m paying for every single user. And it allows them to either pass on a certain amount of savings to be more competitive or.

To reap a much higher profitability, but as Fred went through over and over again in the, and it was eyeopening to me, cause I didn’t think of it like this. If you look at a small to mid sized business, they outsource it, they outsource legal, they outsource bookkeeping finance, their CPA, on average lawyers, if you look at lawyers, they make about a profit margin of 40%.

CPAs, firms make about 30 percent and MSPs on average make about 10%. There’s something wrong with that equation. And given our size and scale, we think it’s a win for our customers and partners, and also for us.

Rich: I’m gonna give you a shot to address three sort of likely common objections that might come out of there.

One will be at that price point. There have to be trade offs. They have to be compromising on something to deliver that much functionality at that price point. Another is that price point looks really great today, but sooner or later, they’re just going to jack that up on me and I’m going to wind up paying a lot.

And then the third is I like the price point. But I’m concerned about putting a lot of eggs in one basket. So those I think are going to be the kind of top three questions that MSPs ask. What do you say to?

Mike: Sure. I’ll start with the middle one first. I won’t go in order and then you’ll have to remind me.

In terms of actually I’ll start with the first one first. We’ll go that way. In terms of, price being too low. That they can’t innovate at that price. My answer to that is yes, we can. The size and scale and our costs believe me, we are making enough margin at [00:25:00] those prices.

The size and scale of us and the ability of our cogs on the back end. We have been meticulous about this for the last eight, nine, 10 years of bringing down that cost. We aren’t a single product company. They have to make all their money off of one single product. That includes sales and marketing, all the, every Google ad they’re running and all that, they have very high costs of sales and go to market.

You can look up some that are public in the security space. They are incredibly unprofitable, some of them but they’re growing fast. We are extremely profitable and we’re able to do that. And I can, as someone who’s been here for 11 years and my team is multiple size than it was, You know when it started on each product your second question was around when we had the

Rich: So the concern that the price looks great now, but wait, it’ll be so we have our

Mike: partner first pledge one part of partner for first pledge is We are guaranteeing in all of our contracts that we can only increase prices the cp cpi plus You Doing it for math up to 5%.

That doesn’t mean, normal CPI is not just, you don’t anybody with social security, it’s maybe 1%, but that doesn’t mean we are automatically doing that. That means that’s the maximum we contractually could do. So if you have a one year subscription, a two year subscription, a three year subscription, your price is exactly the same.

For that one, two or three years. And at the end of your term, if you were to renew, which we would hope everyone does at most, the price is going to be CPI plus, and we’ve seen software companies go way above that, 10, 20, 30%. I’m renewing one right now, actually, that’s significantly higher for our own, for our for our own stuff.

So it is contractually locked in that we’re making that pledge. It’s not just take our word for it. And number three, putting all your eggs in one basket from a security perspective, it’s something I get a question on, from a lot of customers, what if I have everything with, with you?

And I think there are three probably pieces of that question. One is, are you going to be around? And the answer to that is yes, we are financially, viable. I’m like almost every, I’ve been at lots of companies over the years. We are doing very well and you can see the growth rate over years and continued acquisitions.

Number two is are you going to once i’m locked in are you going to increase my price? That was the answer. I just gave it’s contractually we can’t within cp Cpi my lawyers would like to say cpi plus up to five percent Doesn’t mean we would do it. Just means that’s what we could do.

Number three is security related. What if there is a compromise? Does the whole thing come down? And what I like to say to customers is that we have done something a little bit different. Every company has had security issues, including us, but we are modular in that as we have brought on companies and a lot of cases, a lot of companies I’ve worked with.

You merge everything together and you have one product and now your one product is bigger. So one vulnerability or issue brings down everything. We have purposefully built each product as their own entity. So ITGlue, for example Nadir Merchant is founding CTO. He’s still running ITGlue today and they have their own team.

It’s an order of magnitude bigger than it was when he was the founding CTO. They have their own team, their own code base, their own test environments, their own production environments. We connect them as part of a Casaya 365 through APIs so that if there is a flaw in software or somebody compromises, somebody backs up a truck to the data center and walks out with everything.

That is only one of the products. The APIs allow our customers hook to have that in their control because we have some customers that say, I want to connect everything and we have others that say, you know what, RMM is probably from a security perspective, touches the most things I’m going to leave that out there and I’m going to log into it separately.

It gives you that ability to do it. You might have to, it’s common security piece, right? You might have to do a little more in terms of work, but you’re isolating something. So it gives you that kind of flexibility. Okay.

Erick: Mike, amongst a lot of the announcements today, one of the things that I keyed off on was the audience reaction to the [00:30:00] announcement that DNS and web filtering is going to be included in the Kaseya 365 user license.

Why is that so significant to the partners?

Mike: I think, it’s twofold. If you’re going to get a lot of requests in most organizations, Hey, I don’t want the team depends what company you’re serving, but I don’t want the team on social media or all day, or I don’t want I don’t want them on gambling sites.

I don’t want them on adult sites, certainly. And we have malicious sites, which of course nobody wants. The ways to do that have grown up over time. You used to go out and buy a web proxy that just did that. You had that on site, but that becomes irrelevant in this day and age because people aren’t sitting there physically in the office.

There are great tools out there where the whole product, the whole company is DNS filtering, and that gives people the flexibility to very easily say, I don’t want people on malicious sites, gambling sites, whatever, Off we go. And I’ve added another layer of protection, but that comes with a pretty big cost.

So we have built it into Casaya 365 directly into our AV product. So when you set an AV policy, you can set their web policy as well. And it follows them around as long as they’re using, their computer, it follows them wherever they go.

Rich: We were both at the now it’s Casaya 365 endpoint launch in the spring.

Most of the discussion around that product when you guys launched that was around the price point around the margin implications of the business opportunity that enabled. That was obviously a very big part of the Kaseya 365 user story today. But there has also been more talk than I remember in the spring about AI and automation and the value that adds to the product.

Give folks a flavor for what your AI and automation technologies can do in Kaseya 365 User. Sure.

Mike: The, I would say twofold. One is, Kaseya 365 for endpoints and now for users, so basically you get two licenses, you’ve got pretty much what you need. We focused on a we’re going to do this at a price that MSPs can be extremely profitable, and we’re profitable, too.

But that’s half the story. It’s the story that makes the news. It’s a story that’s easier for us to talk about as well. But the other half of the story is the efficiency gains through automation through a I. But, of course, those are not always concrete to you. To to realize, oh, we’re going to save you four hours a week, three hours a week. We’ve all seen that. We came out with a hard hitting here’s cash dollars, but the other half of it is all these automations. So you have your traditional automations that we announced where. I think we gave the example. If you’re using for user, if I’m using our phishing simulation product, it will automatically send it to our phishing protection product and put it in their mailbox, right?

You don’t have to go out and put all these rules to bypass all the security you put in place so that you can do phishing simulation. That’s something that might save me 15 minutes every time I’m going to do a campaign for a customer. It adds up over time. The thing that was really exciting to me was a lot of the AI that we talked about.

And the AI to me, it’s become I don’t know, maybe 10 years ago. Everything, every product known to mankind or service had cloud written in it. And I was still thinking that was frame relay, which many of your viewers probably won’t remember. Now you’re aging. I know now we’re getting up there. But now everything says AI.

Everything, I think my pizza shop and, AI pizza. The reality is there are AI that is useful and meaningful. And so we looked at how can we help without making it, if somebody could cut and paste something into chat GPT, just cause they can do it in one place. In the product, that’s a little better, but not really much of anything.

So we’ve been building AI components out calling them co pilot Cooper co pilots. So we have it in it glue. One of the things that it glue does is it documents your systems. And when you do what’s called flexible assets, you manually go in and say, Oh, this license key for this software product is attached to this network, server and.

And that’s all great. And it’s brought a lot of value, but AI can do that better than a human being can. So it can, in the copilot, it has auto match. It will run AI, match it all up, and then you can approve it. In ticketing, there’s a big, there’s a big lift, I would say, in terms of ticketing. One of the things that Gen AI is really good at is summarization.

You’ve probably seen it in copilot and Microsoft copilot and others. Tickets have, you look at a ticket, you [00:35:00] probably spent your most amount of time reading the 250 notes that are on the ticket as it’s been bouncing around for days, weeks, months, whatever, having a button that summarizes it using AI, it’s night and day.

It’s really good at that. So that’s right in our auto task ticketing. But we also went out and got pulling out of the ticket, a summary For the end customer written in simplistic language. So it will summarize the ticket and give you a response. Still having, we could make it just go out like a chat bot, but still have a human look at it and say, yeah, I want to go with this and having another button right in there for a co pilot saying, simplify this technical disaster, into human language, and it will do that.

And it will read through the ticket and it will also put in remediations. Using Gen AI. So I think it’s the first thing that we’re really doing that’s besides the traditional automations is using the Gen AI where it’s visible to the MSP to do the things that they like, that can really make a difference in that if you add customers and you add texts at the same rate, because it’s linear, your profit margin will never increase.

You might be huge, but. That’s what it’s going to be. So can you level up the people you have by using Gen AI and we built it right into the product.

Erick: Yeah. I sat in on a deep dive of the AI component and the demonstration of it. And it was amazing to me. This is where we’re going to save these technicians a lot of time, but also what I liked, what you just said, Mike, about sending, an update to the end user.

In a way that is consistent, because everybody has their different way of, writing updates and status and things like that. So this is, this provides a consistency, a customer experience and, building out service desk for a long time. I appreciate that. And I appreciate sometimes technicians aren’t the best at, typing and verbalizing in a consistent fashion.

Mike: I would agree. And I’ll even use it in my own daily, right? I use it in word, I’ll write something and then I’ll highlight it and say, make this better. And I should have paid more attention in high school, but it was, it tweaks it only a little bit, but it makes it so much clearer to someone who was actually reading it.

So it can be really helpful.

Erick: Yeah. Yeah. During today’s session, we’re going to talk Fred stated that Kaseya’s security suite is its fastest growing, by far, were the words that I believe he used. How is Kaseya leading with that? Is that something that now has taken precedence in the minds of business owners and the providers that support them that, that as a competitive advantage to lead with that story.

How are you guys using that in relation to getting the word out and delivering this message? I think it’s,

Mike: I think there are some things that are happening in the industry, right? There’s a win. Why is it the fastest growing? Because MSPs are consuming cyber security services. Why? Because their customers need it, right?

So there is some wind at our back. I’d like to say it’s all the features and functions and acquisitions and things like that. If you look at any Any of the analysts for they, they start doing them now at the end of 2024, right? For 2020 predictions for 2025, every single one, and it was the same in 2023 is AI and cybersecurity, those are the two leading things that are happening and both of those are dripping down into the SMB space.

So I would say we don’t necessarily lead with cybersecurity. It’s part of, we lead with. We’re an infrastructure software, infrastructure and security software company, and we’re here to serve MSPs. And they may want to get Kaseya 365 and pull it off the shelf and have all the tools at their disposal, or they may want to buy things, individually based on their customer’s needs.

But I would say that MSPs are changing in terms of how they go to market, where A lot of them are differentiating on the cyber security front. You see it. I’m sure you see it with all the MSPs. They’re leading with cyber security. It’s a great way to get their foot in the door. And really over the past several years, there have been a lot of either products we’ve launched or acquired to help MSPs demonstrate their value to their existing customers.

But also attract and, prospects. For years we’ve been using rapid fire tools network detective. [00:40:00] People have been doing network assessments as part of their prospecting and saying, look, here’s where you are and here’s what we can do. And we just announced we had acquired two years ago, audit, IT, a sales presentation.

So we’re merging the audit IT. And so the, it’s a little less technical and more information Visually stunning. We acquired Vaughan high, which is automated pen testing. And reason we did that was so that M. S. P. S. Could instead of they get a call from their customer and their customer says, I’m being told I have to do a pen test insurance.

Some customer I’m working with who’s bigger. A variety of cyber regulations, whether it’s CMMC or HIPAA or what have you. And usually that money walked out the door. They’d go call a consultant. Now they can fill that, um, fill that inbound demand. But the thing I didn’t anticipate as much, which I should have, is a lot of MSPs are actually using a pen test.

To prospect with their customers to find the holes. And so we introduced it was about them. We talked about it here But it’s about the middle of the summer. We Introduced a prospecting mode where you can run a full pen test It’s going to give you summer results not something you would hand to a to fulfill an audit or something like that But going much deeper because it comes back with I compromise this machine and here’s a screenshot of it and so we introduced prospecting mode so you can run it I had to pick a number and I picked 20 a month, right?

With, when you have the product, you can run the 20 prospecting month, I figured not counting weekends, if you’re doing one pet test a day. Call us, we’ll figure out a better deal, but that would be a lot of prospecting. So we’re giving them those tools so that they can lead with those. They can demonstrate their level of competence.

We were able to compromise your systems. We were able to, here’s your network. They can give the, their prospects something of value. And then they can sell their follow on

Rich: service. So we’re just about out of time, but you mentioned you guys have just in the recent past acquired Bonahi, you’ve acquired AudIT.

You’ve also acquired SAS Alerts. There is a cloud detection and response component, you could say a 365 user. That is a hundred percent based on SaaS technology. You had the option to build, to buy you bought, and you bought that company in particular. Why?

Mike: So when we look out there, one, is there a problem that they solve?

And I think absolutely. Every MSP has had a customer with Microsoft 365, where it’s been compromised for a variety of reasons, because if I can get in there, I can get into the sweet stuff. That SAS alerts is done and we’ve done a lot of monitoring with our own rocket cyber product.

SAS alerts goes to the next deep level, but I think the other part is, we think in terms of usually Microsoft 365 and some MSPs think about Google, but most of your customers have, Salesforce one, salesforce. com dropbox, box. net, all those other SAS apps. And most of our, most of our MSPs aren’t dealing with that at all.

And for all the stuff going on with attacking their Microsoft accounts, if they have Salesforce or they have one, Dropbox or all the other apps, they’re in there too. We just don’t deal with it. You’ll be able to expand what you’re monitoring for that customer. And you look at how fast they have attracted and that’s it.

That’s where the rubber hits the road. How many MSPs have purchased their service product since they started? And it’s, it’s been a ramp like this. And so that speaks for itself on why we made the decision to make the acquisition. We did a similar thing with Vonaheim. We said 500, they hit about 500 MSPs.

Now SAS alerts is growing faster because of SAS, but when 500 MSPs buy a product With a very small team, small marketing, what have you, going to shows like this, there’s something there. It’s just, they, they’re not handing out money for, oh, I’ll try this, here you go. And there’s a definite need in the industry.

We tend to think in terms of Microsoft, but it goes to all the SaaS applications that your customer is using. They’ve gotten a lot of traction with MSPs. And we have good alignment with the company. We’ve known Jim for a long time. He used to work at Kaseya and he used to be a Kaseya customer. And he’s their CEO and we think there’s great alignment between the companies.

Rich: Mike, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Obviously a very busy conference for you and everyone else on the executive team at Kaseya, particularly anyone associated with security. So we thank you for taking some time out and joining us. For anyone in the audience who would like to.

Learn more about you, maybe get in touch with you. Where should they go?

Mike: You can take me at Kasaya. It’s [00:45:00] Mike. Puglia, P U G L I A at Kasaya. com.

Rich: All right. Mike, again, thank you very much. Folks, we’re going to take a quick break here. Erick and I are going to come back on the other side. When we do, we’ll share a few final thoughts about this conversation you just heard.

Have a little fun, wrap up the show, stick around. We’ll be right back. We’ll be right back

And welcome back to part three of this episode of the msp chat podcast Very interesting conversation with Mike. I appreciate him taking the time as we said before. I kicked it off with a question about user security and cloud security kind of becoming synonymous with security generally.

And there were a few reasons for that. You know why that I have that. And that thought is on my mind. So first of all, and we probably shouldn’t have said this earlier on in the interest of full disclosure, Channel Mastered is the organization responsible for the show. SAS Alerts which Caseta has acquired, is a Channel Mastered client.

So we know those guys pretty well and their technology. And in fact, I just recently wrote a research report for them based on some research we did with MSPs about security. A lot of interesting findings in that. One of which was MSPs told us that they are more concerned about cloud vulnerabilities than they are ransomware.

And phishing and business email compromise attacks placed a little bit higher than cloud vulnerabilities, but it was a bit of a step down from cloud to to ransomware. So that tells you that there is rising concern, rising awareness that cloud security is becoming security generally as everything moves Into the SAS world and infrastructure to service into the cloud.

The other thing is yesterday at the show Erick, I had a chance to interview John Murchison. He’s the CEO of BlackPoint cyber. And it just in passing at one point in this interview he tossed in something that was really striking to me. He said at their SOC for every on prem security attack that they register 16.

Sass attacks mostly in the Microsoft 365 world, but it gives you a sense for where the threat activity is. It is overwhelmingly in cloud and specifically in Sass. And it just it makes a ton of sense that this was an area where cause say a really invested not just in security, but specifically in user oriented security, which is how you do security in the cloud age, and they actually went out and bought SAS alerts to build that in, because that is such an important part of the security workload for MSPs.

Now,

Erick: Rich, it makes me wonder that if this new realization, SAS applications are the threat, the real threats now over. Phishing and things like that is a result of companies like Sazzler’s like kind of leading the charge and identifying and monitoring these cloud applications.

I think for the first time, I think they’re, what, three years old, maybe? Yeah, something like that. Now we shine the light on that and all of a sudden, holy cow, that’s where it’s coming from when, prior surveys that we’ve done, phishing has always come up as being the top concern. For ransomware and vulnerability and things like that.

That is, we’re moving more and more of our workloads to the cloud and using more and more of these SaaS applications. Obviously that’s where the bad actors see the opportunity now.

Rich: Which is why it’s been so striking to me for such a long time that there aren’t more companies like SaaSAlerts out there specializing in, in security for SaaS.

And. For MSPs there just aren’t a bunch of them, and and Kaseya Naongs, one of the very few so very one of many very interesting developments from the show. Leaves us with time for just one last thing ladies and gentlemen and as you are Watching or listening to this broadcast.

It’s probably just past halloween We’re actually recording it a day or two before halloween but we’ve got one last thing for you that is seasonally appropriate. And it comes to us from Greg Schultz. Greg is my go to expert on storage and BDR. He has been for years and years. He also lives and works in Stillwater, Minnesota.

And he recently posted on LinkedIn about a tradition in Stillwater that I was not familiar with. So every year they hold a harvest festival there. There is a a pumpkin weighing competition. Farmers bring their biggest pumpkins in to be weighed and the biggest one there, gets a prize.

And we’re talking about pumpkins on the order of a ton like 2, 000 pound and north of there pumpkins. Fun, [00:50:00] interesting. The really kind of key thing is that they then take the one ton pumpkins, they lift them up on a hundred foot crane and drop them. And we will link to video of this in the show notes for this episode.

You know that whole meme, Erick, about this or that being oddly satisfying? There is something oddly satisfying about watching a one tongue pumpkin drop a hundred feet and just smash apart in every possible direction. Thank you, Greg, for pointing this out to me.

Erick: Two quick thoughts, Rich. Slimy, yet satisfying.

And number two, what about all those great ? Pies that have just gone to waste.

Rich: They just mashed up the pumpkins. It’s yeah They’re ready to go put them in the crust and put them in the oven man. Time to start baking that is all the time we’ve got for you this week on this episode of msp chat Thank you so much for joining us here.

We will be back again next week with another episode, for you Erick and I will actually be At two different conferences for that episode, which we will catch you up on then until then we will remind you This is both a video and an audio podcast which means that If you are listening to us and the audio version of the show, but you’d like to check us out on video Go to YouTube, look for MSP chat.

You’re going to find us there. If you’re watching us on YouTube, but you’re into audio podcasts, go to Spotify, Apple, Google, wherever it is. You’re going to find us there too. And however you find us, wherever you do, please subscribe, rate, review. It’s going to help other people like you. And enjoy the show.

The show is produced by the great Russ Johns. It is edited by the great Riley Simpson. They are part of the team at channel mastered. They are ready, willing, and able to create a podcast for you. Podcasts are just a tiny part of what we do for our clients. Channel mastered though. If you wanna learn more about everything we do, please go to www.channel master.com channel.

Mastered has a sister organization called MSP Mastered. That is Erick working directly with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business. You can learn more about that business at www.mspmaster.com. So once again, thank you very much for joining us here at DattoCon. We’re gonna see you in a week’s time.

Until then, please, ladies and gentlemen, always remember you can’t spell channel. Without M. S. P.