Episode 88: From the Server Room to the Boardroom

Erick and Rich discuss the present-day opportunity for MSPs in cloud FinOps and the emerging need for AI FinOps, plus some proven advice for managing service desk capacity for maximum efficiency and minimum employee churn. Then Rich is joined by Kaseya CEO Rania Succar for an in-depth look at her thoughts on AI solutions for SMBs, MCP interfaces, community, culture, and more. And finally, one last thing: the munchies doom loop of eating THC-laden pizza at a pizzeria.

Discussed in this episode:

Kaseya Wants to Sell AI Through MSPs As Well As To Them

Pizzeria mishap left at least 85 people intoxicated with THC after infused oil used for dough

 

Transcript:

Rich: [00:00:00] And 3, 2, 1. Blastoff, ladies and gentlemen, welcome another episode of the MSP Chat podcast, your weekly visit with two talking heads, talking with you about these services, strategies, and success tips you need to make it big and manage services. My name is Rich Freeman. I’m chief analyst and channel Mastered of the organization responsible for this show.

I’m joined by your other co-host as I am every week. Here is our CEO and chief strategist. His name is Erick Simpson. He’s my friend as well. Erick, how you doing? I’m doing well, rich. Just trying to

Erick: keep cool. How about you?

Rich: Yeah, no. So as Erick knows I’m back home in Seattle. I was in Dallas last week where it was like 103 degrees when I arrived.

But everything’s [00:01:00] air conditioned, I couldn’t have been more comfortable my entire stay, it’s like in the mid eighties here in Seattle, but nobody has air conditioning, so it’s been a little warm, not uncomfortable. I’ve been doing okay, but yeah. Warmer than we are used to here this week.

Erick: Yeah, and it’s only the end of August as we record this.

So a few more months of heat. I predict.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah. Summer tends to start late and end early in Seattle, so we’ll be just fine. The, this is probably the last of the heat for us, quite honestly. I hope so. But let us dive into our story of the week. Actually, before I do that, I will just tease that our interview, our spotlight interview segment this week is with Rania Sukar, the CEO of Kaseya.

Since June she has this was my first chance to speak with her. She’s spoken with the media before. We got into some areas that I haven’t heard her talk about previously that I think will be of interest not only to Kaseya Partners, but others. So stick around. That’s coming up in a little bit.

But first, let’s talk about a very different topic that I’m researching now [00:02:00] for a forthcoming post that will appear in my blog channel Hawk. And I would, I was planning loosely, roughly Erick, to do something about Cloud finops. It’s in that same family of ops stuff like DevOps and SecOps.

The idea basically is you’re helping, you’re dovetailing the operational work you do around the cloud with financial management and helping end users, track, manage, reduce, optimize cloud spend. And there were some indications that you know, over the course of the last six months that this is becoming more of a an issue.

It’s something that end users want more and that savvy partners therefore are leaning into a little bit more. Alex Smith formerly of canals now an analyst at Futurum posted something on LinkedIn that I’m quoting from here. I’ve had a number of conversations with the biggest channel partners in this country this past month, and this topic kept coming up as they all invest in and resource their cloud practices.

One of the foundational offerings is that cloud [00:03:00] financial operational assessment. What are customers spending? Where are they spending it? How could it be optimized, et cetera. This is a door opener. It’s a strategic conversation topic. These big partners are finding this is a great way to have more of a consultative relationship with their customers.

And the customers are receptive to these approaches for, because they are in fact spending a lot of money on cloud and having a difficult time kind of tracking and projecting that. I will cite one number out of many that I could possibly cite here. There’s a cloud. Infrastructure platform company called a Azure.

A little bit earlier they, this year they posted some research showing that 83% of the CIOs they surveyed are spending more on cloud infrastructure and applications than anticipated. 83% spending more, only 2% are under budget. So it’s, it’s a big expense item and it’s a very complicated one to track.

And in fact, this is true of MSPs as well. Enable [00:04:00] published some research back around the March timeframe in which they asked a bunch of MSPs, what are your most significant cloud service delivery challenges today? And number one, on the list ahead of security and compliance and finding the expertise you need was cost control.

A lot of customer demand for Cloud finops. It’s an area that MSPs themselves know is a serious issue. It’s a strategic, consultative, trusted advisor kind of conversation topic that you can have with customers. So if you’re not doing that today starting point here, look into that, investigate that there are tools.

You may already have tools that can help you with that Cloud finops present day opportunity. But the reason I wanted to talk about it on the show, Erick, is I’ve been reading some stuff and thinking a little bit about an emerging finops opportunity in AI because we are seeing, so Gartner says end user spending on gen AI models will total $14.2 billion this [00:05:00] year.

A lot of money. It’s up 148.3% this year or will be. So businesses are spending a lot of money. The rate of spending increase is growing rapidly. We’ve all seen in the news recently you and I have spoken on the show about the gap between the investments being made in AI and the ROI that companies feel like they’re getting from those investments.

And so I believe that if finops for AI is not an issue today, it’s going to be very soon. And this will be again, a great strategic consultative part of the conversation. Instead of just coming to your customers and telling them let’s get a bunch of copilot and you, I’m, I’m gonna sell you a bunch of ai.

Also talk to them about being their strategic AI advisor who is going to help them measure, manage, and optimize their cloud spend. I think that is gonna be a sticky addition to the AI conversations that our listeners and viewers [00:06:00] should be having with their customers Now.

Erick: It’s a really interesting point where we are today, rich in seeing this, migration to, to the cloud, right?

This cloud transformation. We’ve been seeing it since, accelerate, since COVID, we’re getting more and more workloads into the cloud. Clients are using SaaS applications, there’s some consumption going on. And now there’s this AI conversation that’s happening, right? So are you sensing that MSPs now will be more valuable in having more more friendly conversations with CFOs and stickiness with an organization that they’re serving that now has a CFO role in there where now we are not only managing the day-to-day service desk patching, et cetera, where that.

We all know is a commodity, and it’s just something that is expected now. But as we’ve been talking about on the show for quite a while now, [00:07:00] rich the need for MSPs to become more strategically valuable from a business outcome perspective. So are you now sensing that the MSPs can get there a little bit differently and a little bit faster as they’re now assessing the costs of, storage and cloud shadow IT and then, and AI architecting and building out storage for that and managing that on a regular basis.

So now we’re seeing some cost savings there that then can be reinvested or applied in other solutions like, becoming strategically valuable in managing AI and other things for clients. What are your thought.

Rich: Whether or not MSPs on mass are doing what you were just saying right now is hard to say.

Should they be doing it? Yes. I really wanna z zero in though on something that you said earlier there, which I think is a really good point and an important one. I, when I was in Dallas, I was attending the [00:08:00] twenties vision event. John Pal Yuka, the president and CEO of Enable was there and he was on stage at one point talking about how, we, and this is nothing new, but we’re seeing the emergence of very big MSPs, billion dollar MSPs selling into larger organizations and even smaller MSPs are moving upscale a little bit into the mid-market, into larger companies large enough to have a CFO as you were talking about.

And a skill, this is one of the things John was saying is a skill that he’s seeing MSPs need to cultivate is, okay, if I’m selling into a larger business, I’m probably meeting as often with a CIO as I am with like a business owner or cce. I need to know how to have that conversation.

And if the business is big enough to have a CFO, then it’s absolutely a great idea. You wanna tailor the conversation around cloud or AI or anything else to your audience. And so if you’re talking to the CFO the thing that you’re gonna foreground is our [00:09:00] expertise in cloud finops.

We, let’s talk about your, the cloud budget and the headaches that you’re having around that. Let me tell you how I can help you with that. And that’s gonna be a well received message by the CCFO. And then when you’re talking to the, the CEO, maybe you’re talking more a about the digital transformation you can make possible through cloud investments.

But yeah, th there, th this is a great opening for anyone who is selling into larger organizations large enough to have a CFO to have a tailored conversation with that executive.

Erick: So it’s the journey that MSPs need to make from the server room to the boardroom.

Rich: Nicely done. That’s indeed. And never too early begin for anyone

Erick: on our audit.

Yeah, I stole that from somebody, but yeah, just reminded me like that’s the journey. Like we have to, be able to have those conversations at that level to, aspire to become, a multimillion dollar or even a billion dollar [00:10:00] MSP.

Rich: Erick, let’s move on to your tip of the week.

People who are not on the journey of the boardroom ought to get started soon, but even when you get there, you’re still gonna have a service desk. If you’re an MSP, you’re still gonna face some challenges around that, and you’re, you wanna zero in on one in particular this week.

What is that?

Erick: Yes. As I often do I pull these business tips from, ripped from the headlines, working with partners and things like that. And I had a really interesting conversation with a partner just this week, and they were they asked to challenge me about some challenges they’ve identified within their service desk team.

From a burnout perspective, right? And none of us are strangers that have had a scenario where, we’re working with teams of folks and burnout and churn is always there. And we wanna do everything we can to guard against it, rich. But, sometimes things can escalate quickly, especially if you’ve got, somebody that’s very vocal that’s on the team that others [00:11:00] respect.

I think there’s this kind of, pervasive negativity that can begin to impact the rest of the team, especially when we’re working, in as such a close team of folks like we have in service desk or knock and things like that. So we were having a conversation and I started asking questions about let me understand kind of the makeup of the team, how you’ve got them distributed.

How does, what, how does your incident management process work? And we had done some work in the past, rich, identifying and categorizing, what tickets should always go to, like tier one or level one and what tickets should never go there because they’re just gonna get escalated out anyway.

And making sure that the team is capable of solving those tickets. And then tickets that go to, level two or tier two, those are also identified et cetera. And, in my experience, rich, back even before I was in MSP back in the enterprise days, building out call centers and service desk for really large Fortune 1000 organizations, it was all about, how quickly could we [00:12:00] resolve those tickets, right?

Meantime to resolution, things like that. And bringing that perspective, what I found is a a formula for what I expect. The ticket load to be in different tiers. And it’s a little different in the enterprise when you manage the, the entire infrastructure and things like that.

But then, working with, my own MS. P and then other MSPs, ever since I got to the point where I feel like 97 plus percent of tickets should be like a level one or tier one ticket. That’s what I see. And what we see in working with partners maybe 1% 1.5% might be level two, and maybe a fraction of a percent might be level three.

When, and of course there’s outliers, rich, but when we categorize tickets the way that I do and document how to resolve them and the escalation process, that’s how I see things. And so with this particular partner, those numbers were not close to that. They were [00:13:00] escalating a, 40 plus percent to level two and about 40% in level one, and then the balance into level three.

And I said, okay, let’s identify what that is. Now, of course, this is causing a tremendous amount of, stress and additional workload for the level two and level three techs who are now addressing tickets that they feel should be level one tickets. So this is the crux of the issue.

So is the team or the staff in the tier one or level one capable of addressing these tickets? And a couple of tips come to mind, rich. Number one, we’ve gotta identify and categorize tickets and assign them to the staff that can solve them. Now, if we feel like that’s not getting done, then we should look at, some training, some competency work.

Maybe there’s some documentation that’s missing. Maybe they don’t have the access and the rights that they need in order to [00:14:00] solve those tickets. So those are the kind of the low hanging fruit things that we’re looking at. And in furthering that conversation with the partner, they said, Hey, we are getting ready to hire another tier three technician or engineer.

And I asked, why that is? And I said, listen, what’s happening here is we’ve got too many tickets that level one isn’t able to solve right now, and they’re escalating up into level two and beyond. I recommend you bring in another level one technician that may be a level one and a half tier one and a half, so that we can address the root cause of the issue.

And then the folks that you know, aren’t able to solve those, they can mentor and coach them identify, issues where the documentation is faultier, things like that. Bring in a seasoned. L one or tier one technician, and I would say even compensate them a little bit more than you typically would for that role so that you can get a handle on this.

And this will help [00:15:00] address some of this burnout and potential at risk situation you have with some of your higher level technicians.

Rich: You know that there’s actually a lot there. A lot that’s interesting to me. But the first thing that popped into my mind, listening to the story and even going back, like the formula that you were talking about and let’s just round up and say.

97% level one, 2%, level two, 1% level three. So it all adds up to, a hundred percent. Yeah. Those numbers are going to change, right? Like they’re, we’re, it’s still early-ish days, but we’re seeing tools come along that can do more and more of the level one work. I’m wondering to what degree for the people in our audience out there who are just now reali and by the way, one of the morals of the story for the audience this is why you hire people like Erick, that you’ve been escalating 40% of your level on tickets, thinking everybody else does that, and you need a perspective from somebody like him to say, no, that’s actually not normal or good [00:16:00] if you are just discovering that, you’re escalating 20% or 30%, and that’s not best practice.

To what extent should those people be looking at. Tooling which is ostensibly where the industry is going versus people I, or, training I think is a key part of this, but what about tooling versus techs?

Erick: So there’s a lot of components that go into the ability to resolve incidents and do incident lifecycle management, rich.

And part of it is platform, part of it is process, and part of it is people, right? So if we look at today, let’s say pre ai, right? Because we know that AI is, we expect AI to have a significant impact on this kind of a situation. A low level noisy tier one tickets, as we see agentic AI and tools and platforms really being, being incorporating AI to help with this.

But at the end of the day, you still have to have your processes and you still have to have the people that can manage and [00:17:00] architect and support these things. Yes. The take home message here is Rich. If we’re escalating these tickets beyond level one or tier one, that should be being addressed at that tier, it’s costing us not twice as much to close those tickets, but probably three or four times as much.

Because, again, if you consider the the ancillary costs of not capacity planning and addressing incentive management, effectively these things, c can create churn in your staff, can create churn in your client relationships, right? And impacting your profit margin to such a degree that you start becoming much less profitable than what even, someone thinking that low profit might be.

So at the end of the day, we’re trying to identify what the cost of every ticket is, in a larger strategic conversation talking. Spin ops for service desk. Now, rich, right? So what does it cost us to solve a ticket? A level one ticket [00:18:00] should not cost us 40 or $50 to solve, but if we’re escalating it out, somebody is touching it, spending time and escalating it, and then that higher level, higher paid technician, is touching it and then hopefully resolving at that point.

These are where the financial metrics really start to negatively impact an organization and company equity. And especially, as many more MSPs now are looking to build a company that has equity value that then they can sell or the highest offer. So to your point about, platformization and ai, all of that is going to help.

But we have to solve the issue from a platform and a process and a people perspective now, so that then we can leverage the benefit of AI potentially coming in and addressing it based upon. The parameters. That’s our secret sauce on our formula, how we serve our clients and our unique differentiator.

Because at the end of the day, rich, every MSP is probably going to be [00:19:00] adopting AI in some form or fashion into their process, right? So early adopters first mover advantage probably is right now in the next six or 12 months, but pretty soon everybody’s gonna start adopting these tools.

And again, it falls back to our processes and people at that point.

Rich: A perfect segue actually to our interview segment. Because AI and AI tooling as well as external customer facing ai. These were among the topics that I got into in an interview recorded last week actually at the vision event in Dallas with Rania Sukar, the CEO of Kaseya.

Folks, Erick and I are gonna take a quick break here when we come back on the other side. You will get that interview that I had with her and then Erick will rejoin me after that and we will share some thoughts about what she had to say and wrap up the show. Stick around. We’ll be right back

and welcome back part two of this episode of the MSP Chat [00:20:00] podcast, our spotlight interview segment, where we are very pleased to be joined by the newly appointed CEO of Kase. Her name is Ranya Sukar Ranya, welcome to the show.

Rania: Thanks for having me. Rich.

Rich: First opportunity for us to meet.

Rania: Yes.

Rich: You have done some interviews, you’ve been on other podcasts before, so I’m guessing, given the intense curiosity about you out in the channel right now, folks have some idea of who you are, but four people in our audience who are just encountering you for the first time.

Tell ’em a little bit about yourself.

Rania: Sure. First I’m very excited to be here and having this conversation. I’d say that I have. Tremendous passion, and I’ve talked about this in other spaces as well, to drive industry leading innovation to solve really big challenges around the world.

And I’ve particularly been focused over the last decade on solving small business challenges, helping fuel the success of small businesses with industry leading technology. I’ve done that by helping solve problems small businesses face when it comes to managing cash flow, one of the top reasons small businesses fail, and also [00:21:00] how to create AI powered solutions to help them grow.

And that’s why I’m excited to be at Kaseya. I think we have an incredible opportunity right now to lead the industry in transforming the success of small businesses and the MSPs who partner with them.

Rich: Fantastic. Let’s talk about big opportunities and big challenges. We’ll start with AI because they take away my podcast license.

If I don’t start with ai. There are obviously both internal and external applications of AI. For an Ms. P beginning, maybe with the internal ones, what would you say, where is Kase right now in terms of how it’s enabling MSPs through ai and where do you see opportunities to build on that?

Rania: What an exciting moment this is.

I was just reflecting on that this morning. I’ve been reflecting on that over the last few months. We are at a pivotal moment right now for innovation. We’re at a pivotal moment as we think about the future of SMB success, business success, and it’s all given the [00:22:00] tools we have around AI right now. So we talk about internal productivity for MSPs.

It’s gonna look entirely different once these tools fully take form. And we’re in the very early innings of this. One of the things that’s been surprising is how slowly businesses have adopted ai. It turns out to have been a lot more challenging than initially was thought. On the consumer side, it’s been rapid adoption, but on the business side it’s been slower and it’s been slower because of the change management required for businesses to adopt it and also the investment required to unify the data layer.

That said, there are several applications we get unbelievably excited about when we think about partnering to Retool MSPs to get the efficiency that AI can drive for them. So lemme describe what that can look like and the type of work Kaseya is doing. Today, in every conversation I’ve had with MSPs, they talk about the tremendous burden and tax required to, to do all the manual work they’re doing today to deliver the [00:23:00] IT security backup services they’re delivering to their customers.

Way too manual even with all the AI and automation out there. So Kase is building industry leading tools. Given the breadth of our platform and the data we have to allow MSPs to automate all of that work. And we will measure that maniacally by looking at things like, to what extent have we reduced the ticket volume coming into MSPs?

To what extent are those tickets able to be resolved on the first touch? To what extent are we able to dramatically reduce the meantime to resolution and as a result significantly improve the profit margin of msp? So we will hold ourselves personally accountable with the offerings we put in the market in the coming months to bring those metrics to improve.

That’s of course building on everything we’ve done with Cooper Bots to date. Then there’s the ability to leverage AI to drive growth for MSPs. It’s not just about profitability, it’s also about growth. So as you think about go to market, all the tooling that we can partner with MSPs to put in place to better qualify [00:24:00] leads to more effectively convert leads to train their go to market teams, to be more effective in driving that conversion.

To use AI to help package and price offerings to be more efficient, all of that. So those are the type of areas where we’re working with MSPs to drive results. And again, we’ve been in the market with Cooper Bots for some time. The next generation of our offerings here, which we’ll be talking about at Dacon in Miami, we’ll be particularly powerful.

Rich: So the Cooper Bots piece of that you’re building on what you have. You’re gonna supercharge that a little bit. There’s gonna be more functionality. The second piece of what you were talking about sounds like a combination of AI and bi basically automating some of the business intelligence around the customer opportunity.

Rania: Yeah. And by the way, I love thinking about the possibilities of business intelligence. It is so challenging today to get the business intelligence you need to run your business. Because data’s fragmented, typically MSPs and SMBs use dozens of different applications to run their business. And as a result, all the data’s fragmented.

As I talk to MSPs all the time, they’re talking [00:25:00] about how the fact that some of their customer data is sitting in their CRM databases, some of it’s sitting in their PSA, all they want is a unified 360 degree view of their customer. And those are exactly the type of things we’ll be able to bring to market when we bring these gen ai and as you said, BI solutions to MSPs.

Rich: Let’s talk a little bit about that, the data layer. ’cause I’ve heard you say in other talk about that issue in other interviews before, and obviously consolidate good, clean, consolidated data is the starting point for ai. But I’m curious are you envisioning a solution or a service Kaseya could offer that would help the MSP.

Consolidate their data, help the MSP consolidate the customer’s data, or are you thinking more just along the lines of consolidating Kase a’s data so it’s more actionable for the MSP or all the above?

Rania: I love the framing of those three layers, rich. Absolutely. On all of the above. Starting with our data we have the industry’s most comprehensive suite of solutions today with the 40 offerings that exists across the Kaseya platform, that [00:26:00] is an incredible place to start with all of this ENT work.

And so we are beginning by ensuring that we’ve built that unified data layer for Kaseya. And taking an MCP approach across all of our offerings so that we can build an integrated IT orchestrator for MSPs so they can operate across the entire suite in seamless ways with deep integration. And that’s the type of offering we’ll be, we’re working on, and we’ll be bringing to market.

So that’s on our side so that it all works truly seamlessly. Today we already have exceptionally powerful integrations across RMM and PSA and IT glue, but it’ll just get more powerful in this next generation. For MSPs, there is an opportunity for Kaseya to work, to help MSPs bring all their data together and layer that business intelligence on top of it.

Now I’m, we’re very excited about the third layer that you’re talking about. There’s a tremendous opportunity today for MSPs to take the leading role in retrofitting SMBs to take advantage of this AI revolution. It is very power painful to be a small business today because their data is [00:27:00] split again across 20 applications, and it’s very hard for them to answer the business questions that they need to grow.

What we envision is that through Kaseya small business, MSPs will be able to identify the agents that are gonna be most effective for their small business customers the agents that include things related to growth, to analysis, to production, to serving their customers and delivering for their customers.

And they’ll be able to access those agents through the Kaseya Suite and then deliver them seamlessly to their customers. And we’re working on some exciting partnerships to bring that to market.

Rich: Yeah, I wanted to get into the the AG Agentic AI story. Actually, maybe even before we talk about where Kaseya is gonna play there, talk a little bit more about your vision, how you envision MSPs growing, helping their s and b customers grow with Ag Agentic AI is the idea, basically I’m going to help you.

I’m an MSP, I’m gonna help you automate your business and use these agents to automate workflows, et cetera, [00:28:00] and you’re gonna pay me to run all that. What’s the business opportunity for the MSP and agent A?

Rania: We’ve talked about a few of them. There’s multiple different layers of opportunity, and that’s why I think this moment is so exciting, certainly to take the work that MSPs are currently doing for SMBs around IT management, security backup, and dramatically improve the efficiency of delivering those through all the AI that we talked about.

And then there are the new service lines that. MSPs are gonna be able to deliver to SMBs around. We are gonna help you. We are gonna be your primary partner. This is the MSP delivering to the small business. We’re gonna help be your primary partner to. Change the approach you’re taking to bring AI to everything you’re doing from an operational efficiency perspective and also a growth perspective.

And so it’ll start with, consulting where the MSP will be able to sit down with their customers and say, let’s draw a map of all the areas where we can improve things. And then out of the box agents that are set up. By vertical that Kaseya has curated in the platform that m that MSPs can then provide to their customers.

So the [00:29:00] fee structure for MSPs will look like, certainly. They’re providing services and consulting and all of that, but then they’re also deploying, they’re also gonna charge for the agents that they’re deploying, and those will be new pricing models focused more on outcomes versus on traditional software fees.

So it’ll be a new pricing model, but it’ll allow MSPs to be at the forefront front of this incredibly exciting moment. And the reason I think MSPs are uniquely positioned to do this is because of how hard AI is to adopt. And we’ve seen that over and over. So small businesses need, they need advisors.

The MSPs are uniquely positioned to do that, and they need partners in the data work to make it happen.

Rich: So PAX eight is building an agent marketplace. Super Ops just rolled out an agent marketplace. It sounds like maybe there’s an agent marketplace in K’s future. It is it gonna be stocked with agents you have built exclusively.

Rania: You’re gonna see some interesting partnership announcements here. It will include ones that we’ve built. It’ll include ones that we’re curating, that are coming from partners. So it’ll [00:30:00] be a combination of self-built and then curated as well. And again, we, our solution is very unique because MSPs rely on the Casea stack to run their business, and therefore when they, when we bring them the marketplace, it’ll be integrated with everything else they do to run their business.

And the integration will be very deep across everything. We know that MSPs struggle because of the proliferation of tools that they’re using, and so that’s a unique value proposition we’ll have when it comes to marketplaces.

Rich: The answer might be that it’s going to vary, but I’m curious what you were talking about pricing models, which is a very interesting kind of new area.

Right now with AG agentic ai, what will the pricing model look like from Kaseya to the MSP for agents? Will that be outcome based as well in terms of how they pay

Rania: when exactly. So when when, it’ll be very different. So if MSPs are leveraging kissa ass new digital workers to get their, for example, PSA work completed and all the tickets that are coming in, it will be more based on the [00:31:00] outcomes that we’re delivering.

How many tickets are being closed or what is the improvement in the time to respond or the or the reduction in tickets coming in. So it’ll be very outcome based. And this is a very new area as you described. No one is doing it right yet. There’s a lot of discussion around it, but it’ll be one that we will be partnering with MSP.

So everybody feels like there’s strong value in the equation and ecosystem.

Rich: I’ve gotta believe you’re talking to a partner advisory council of some kind about that now. What kind of feedback are you getting?

Rania: Right now, the conversation we’re having with our partner advisory councils is how can you bring this faster to market?

Because what’s in the market isn’t cutting it today. Every conversation I’ve had with MSP since I joined is this deep desire to accelerate the automation roadmap. People are experimenting with third party solutions, but what they tell us is, there’s a handful of MSPs that have been successful with third party solutions, but many of them are not, because it is too hard to implement the automation.

So often they’ll try [00:32:00] and it won’t work and they’ll abandon. And so it’s too hard to implement the automation solutions in the market. They’re looking for something that’s more scalable, more out of the box that we’ll work on, edge cases that is truly agentic and not just RPA. And so the conversation isn’t even around pricing yet.

It is around bring us the innovation that’s gonna solve our automation problems. And as I said, we’re, we’ve been working on something with significant input from the industry and we’re excited to share more of that at our conference later in October. Okay.

Rich: You mentioned partnerships before in the context of what you’re doing around agents.

If I look at Kaseya and its strategy over the course of the last decade, basically, you folks have built out a comprehensive and tightly integrated suite of products source code level integration, and that really has been the idea that the value proposition to the MSP is there are things these products can do together because they are integrated at that level.

That’s just not possible via APIs and multi-vendor ecosystem. It, is that still how [00:33:00] you think about your platform and your strategy? Is there any kind of variation as you look ahead in terms of how you might integrate or work with third parties?

Rania: What’s been core to our strategy to date, as you said, is that we have effectively brought together the full suite of offerings that.

MSPs need, and we’ve constantly added more and more as trends have changed to the market. So security became increasingly important. We added more offerings to our suite. We’ll continue to do that. We’ll continue to drive breadth and expand the platform. What will be different is, and we talked a little bit about this at our Connect conference in Las Vegas, even before I joined the leadership team, talked about it, is we’ll invest more in our own internal innovation against the offerings we’re bringing into the platform.

So we’ve already made a significant investment in our r and d efforts this year, and we’ll continue to do that so that when you come to Kaseya, you get the benefit of this end-to-end platform, but you also can feel confident that each part of the platform is delivering exceptional solutions for you and best of breed solutions.

And so that’s what will be different. The other thing that will be different is the strength of the [00:34:00] integration. The integration has already been strong as you described, but it’ll be even more cutting edge given what’s possible with the MCP layer that’ll truly bring this together end to end.

Rich: So

Rania: that will make our existing platform even more uniquely valuable for the MSPs who use it.

Rich: So you invoked MCP. This is something that’s been on my mind Yes. Lately. So that’s great. ‘Cause I’m really curious about how companies like Kaseya start to build that, take advantage of that, build that into their products at the interface layer at in other ways. What is the thinking inside Kase right now about where the possibilities are with MCP?

Rania: The possibilities are. Unbelievably exciting, especially given that we have these 40 tools together that can now be brought together with this MCP layer. So what will look different is the way that our MSPs interact with the platform. It will no longer be coming into the interface that exists today.

It’ll be much more [00:35:00] oriented around a single interface where you can have a, you can have a conversation around, here’s what I’d like to do. And you can ask it questions. Show me what you, what observability layer, show me what decisions you made help explain what’s going on. So the interface will look very different when it all comes together.

Rich: I’m imagining it will be chat bot esque. Basically very simple. Your natural language interaction, you’re telling it what you wanna accomplish and watching it do it for you.

Rania: That’s right. And then again, having the ability to understand what it’s doing and why it’s doing to set controls to the extent you want it to be operating for you versus just giving you indications and then you take action against it.

Rich: How imminent is that? The arrival of that?

Rania: We think with the technology available today, this is something that is something that there’ll be available in a certain degree in, the next, in 2026, for example. So this is something that is not far away. There,

Rich: there are potentially radical implications of that just in terms of the skillset required to be a [00:36:00] technician.

As you think about what this means for the MSP partners what will the business impact be of having the ability to inter interface interact with the software in that way?

Rania: It’s definitely gonna require change. It requires change for all of us and how we’re operating and what we’re doing.

So on one level for those who embrace change, and we will be partners in that change, it creates opportunity for MSPs to become even more strategic advisors to their customers because a lot of the ways they were spending time historically become a lot more efficient. So it creates space for all of that and adding new business lines that we’ve talked about where we’re now bringing these AI offerings to SMBs and a whole new set of business lines that MSPs can lead the way in.

So that’s what I would say. It’s gonna require change, but Kase is committed to being a partner in that change and it’s an exciting opportunity there.

Rich: You have spoken in other places about community. Community is one of the things, as I understand it, that you really wanna focus on. In the early going [00:37:00] here in the new job, ConnectWise is known for its community.

DA was Right, very well known for its community. Talk a little bit about what you wanna do to build community, but maybe also just why it feels like an opportunity, why it feels important for Kaseya to invest more heavily in, in community. How does that benefit not only the partners, but you as well?

Rania: Yeah. One of the things that’s really unique about the MSP. Ecosystem is the degree to which the MSP owners feel a sense of community and wanna help each other and wanna lean together to share best practices and exchange best practices. And today there’s been a lot of success in the community, but it strikes me that it’s been more, it hasn’t scaled to its full potential.

So today you have very effective peer groups where people get together, they exchange best practices, MSPs, who are part of peer groups. We see it with our peer groups. See better results. They see better growth, better profitability because they exchange best practices. So we’re now committed to saying, how do we dramatically scale the goodness of what we see in peer groups to [00:38:00] the broader community?

If you’re part of the Kase ecosystem, we wanna make sure that you benefit from the knowledge of a community. So how can we do that through technology? Certainly we can do it by helping share best practices. When you come to the Kaseya, PSA cust, our customers ask us for this all the time. It’s our responsibility to share with you to say, these are the best practices that we see top performing MSPs implementing to help you take advantage of.

The power of the capability and the tool. So there’s benchmarking the tools then help you get the most out of the tool as opposed to constantly feeling like you’re only using 5% or 10% of the tool. We’ll be investing in our online platform as well to connect people together so they can get that goodness.

So this is about moving from a model we know works, but doesn’t scale significantly to bringing technology to help it scale much more broadly. And bringing all the Kaseya partners giving them access to all of this by them being part of the Kaseya network.

Rich: Speaking of scale, that was something that I wanted to to bring up actually.

’cause one of the themes that I’ve picked up at this event here, there’s been a [00:39:00] lot of talk about how MSPs are scaling. We’re seeing bigger MSPs serving bigger customers right now. And that potentially has implications for what they need. What MSPs need from a tool set? Just, historically there was the idea that there was an entry level set of tools.

Yeah. And then as you evolve, you maybe outgrow that you need something more sophisticated. I’m curious how or to what degree does Kase think about the fact that there are both smaller and much, much bigger MSPs out there with potentially different needs? Does that factor into the product thinking at all?

Rania: It definitely does and I’ve spent a lot of time with the larger consolidating MSPs over time. And what we hear from them consistently is they need a tool set that a lot, that gives them flexibility and allows them to differentiate their offering and to be premium solutions in the market. They wanna have that solution set so they can win and grow more with their end customers.

And so that is a priority for us to ensure that all of our solutions give them the APIs, the customization that they need to grow. So that’s one [00:40:00] piece. The other thing we hear a lot from scaling and consolidating MSPs is they need help with that consolidation. It is not easy to do all of the MA and often I hear from.

Consolidating MSPs that were pausing a little bit on m and a. ’cause the last one was less successful than we hoped it would be. And our commitment to these consolidating MSPs is to be a partner in that, to ensure that the Kaseya platform makes it incredibly easy to integrate new acquisitions onto.

So it’s a platform that creates ease for that. And secondly, that we’re partners in in, helping through the process based on all the m and a we’ve seen happen in the industry. So that’s another area that I think is quite important. And then the other conversation we have with scaling MSPs is we want help with growth.

It’s not just about inorganic growth. We want help with organic growth. We want Kaseya to be our partner in organic growth. And that’s an area we’re very excited about leaning into even more than we have in the past. Certainly through the community and peer group concept, but also. By increasingly going to market with the MSPs that are part of the Kase [00:41:00] ecosystem.

And we’ll be talking more about that in the coming months.

Rich: Can you drop a hint or two? That’s interesting.

Rania: Yes. I will drop a hint or two of the portfolio of opportunities. We will, we are still working on this. What’s been very clear to me is this is a top ask in the market and we are well positioned to deliver on it, but I’ll share with you a menu of opportunities versus a committed set of offerings to date.

Many areas. One is. Kase itself gets a lot of inbound leads from SMBs. We have the opportunity to pass those back to top partners in the Kase ecosystem. We have an opportunity to sell with our MSPs for them to register the deals that we’re working on and for our direct go-to-market teams to be partnering with our MSPs to close those deals.

We have an opportunity to lean more into marketing development funds and working with MSPs around that. We have an opportunity to build. A a gen AI set of go-to-market tools that are custom built for MSPs and get those into their hands so their go-to-market teams can be more efficient. We have the opportunity to unify the customer data, the 360 data, to help MSPs [00:42:00] say, I’m gonna be best in class in serving my customers.

’cause I deeply understand every interaction I’ve had with them. And then of course, we can play a significant role in pricing and packaging, which a lot of MSPs ask us for advice on. So there’s a whole menu of areas. What I will say right now is we’ve heard loud and clear that this is a top ask and we’re committed to to bringing some exciting announcements in this space.

Rich: So MSPs hear MDF, they hear co-sell, they get happy and excited, but then they think a little bit about the sales force at a company like Kaseya going to market with them. And then they get a maybe. Yeah. So how do you assure people that there, there are very clear lines and we’re not gonna stray over them?

Rania: Yeah. In fact, I was in a meeting internally hearing about some of this historical tension and we will announce some very clear lines of companies below the size, for example will never be worked through Kaseya. We want our MSPs to win. We want, when they win, we win. It’s very clear.

And so we need to be very clear about, what those demarcations will be and we will communicate them. And there has historically been some tension there. You’re exactly [00:43:00] right. So I have heard it. We’ve talked about it and therefore we will communicate clear demarcation there.

Rich: So historical tension.

Another great segue ’cause you’ve talked about culture. Yeah. And I don’t know if you’re as big a fan of Kara Swisher’s podcast as I am, but on one of those shows, she’ll go out and ask people to submit a question to whoever’s going to be interviewed. And I was talking with Tim Conel of the 20th, couple days ago.

I interviewed Jay McBain for the podcast yesterday. Yeah. I said, Hey, I’m gonna be doing this interview. What should I ask about? And they both in different ways brought up culture.

Rania: Yeah.

Rich: So what would you say to the audience here about maybe the culture related issues that you are looking at right now and how you see the way you attempt or plan to attempt to address some of those cultural tensions that have existed before?

Rania: One of the things I shared. When I first joined, I shared it at our Datto conference in Dublin in June, was that as we [00:44:00] build a new set of values for the next chapter of Kaseya, one of the most important ones is that we will be committed to delivering end-to-end exceptional experiences for our customers.

Every touch point that they have with Kaseya, we will take pride in the experience that we’re delivering. So I can make that a lot more concrete when customers are engaging with our account managers. It won’t feel like. A sales transaction, it’ll feel like a partnership transaction, which starts with the account managers measuring their success by their Ms.

P success and saying to them, let’s talk together about how much you wanna grow your top line and how much you wanna improve your profitability. And let’s put in place a plan to get there. And so every conversation will be consultative versus transactional. When they come to onboarding, it will feel very seamless, very integrated, very tech forward, and very focused on sharing all the best practices we’ve seen and ensuring they’re getting most out of the solutions that they just bought, versus feeling more transactional and like a commercial transaction.

Then when it [00:45:00] comes to support, they will feel significant expertise in every interaction. Swift resolution. When they use our products, they will. Work the way they expect very high, all the metrics will deliver for the customer the way they expected. And then billing will be transparent and clear and the billing models will focus, will align the MSP’s value outcomes.

With, we won’t have a misalignment. One of the top things that our MSPs have said over and over again is the Kaseya billing model is rigid. The contracting model is rigid and we’re working significantly to improve that. One area is we announced back in April that we would, and Jim Lippy did this at our connect conference in Vegas, that we would stop the high watermark pricing and we will be talking about when, some very exciting news about when that will actually be rolled out and implemented much earlier than we had originally announced.

So we’ll be talking more about that imminently. Stay tuned. So that’s what we talked about. So I agree with you that historically there has been these areas of [00:46:00] friction and we’re hyper-focused on addressing them. And each area I just mentioned to you, the cu our customers should already begin to feel improvement.

We’ve been rolling out things in every one of those dimensions that should translate into a better, more friction free experience. And we’re measuring every element of that.

Rich: It, it, it’s interesting. John Palka from Enable was on stage at this event yesterday, and he said something really interesting about how maybe the thing that MSP should be focused on is Wes SLA and more XLA, meaning experience level agreement and and just really focusing on customer experience.

And it was interesting kind of hearing you put your cultural related plans in the context of experience. It really does feel increasingly like the way. MSP competes with other MSPs. The way a Kaseya competes May is in the quality of that experience that the customer, whoever that is, has with the company.

Rania: And I talk about it in two ways. I love that point. And, two, two ways I’d bring it to life. One is [00:47:00] measuring outcomes. We need to hold ourselves to the outcomes, which are the benefit outcomes that our MSPs face and their end customers face. So everyone across Kaseya is now being measured by the degree to which we’re accelerating growth of the MSPs who are on our platform and accelerating profitability.

It’s not just about did I launch this product? It’s about how much did this new feature in our RMM suite deliver against those outcomes. And those are each broken down by specifics. How much did the tickets go down? How many age agents do you need per endpoint? All of these metrics are being measured now.

So that’s one piece of the experience is if we hold ourselves accountable to the outcomes, the experience of our customers will get better. But secondly, it’s also about allowing our customers to tailor the experience they have so that they can win in the market. And there we need to create solutions that allow for that flexibility for them so they can do that.

Rich: So obviously I want to ask you all the top secret stuff you’re going now. It’s at Dacon, but I won’t do that in the interest of being a gracious host though, tell me a little bit about what I can expect at Dacon and [00:48:00] why the folks in our audience here should come to the show.

Rania: Okay. Great. I’ll tease all the things we’ve been working on.

It’s very consistent with the themes I’ve been talking about since I joined. The first theme that I talked about when I joined is that we’re gonna be very focused on measuring our success based on the success of MSPs. And one of the big areas we started with is improving profitability of MSPs. So that’s a big focus for us.

And the way we’re gonna do that is through the the ENT platform we’re building on the next generation of Cooper Bots. And so we’ll be. Demoing and showing some of what that will look like for MSPs, and really leaning into why Kaseya can deliver uniquely exceptional outcomes for MSPs. And that’ll come because of the data and the the breadth of the platform, but also the very bold approach we’re taking here.

So that’s one piece. I’ve also talked a lot about the end to end frictionless experiences that we want our customers to have with Kaseya. So we’ll be talking a lot about billing and we’ll be talking a lot [00:49:00] about some of the things I teed up earlier, but improving the billing experience and the way our customers are transacting with Kaseya.

We’ll also be talking in that context about making it easier for MSPs on our platform to, to invoice their end customers. This is a big pain point and we’ll have some significant improvements there. And then there’ll be improvements and exciting announcements on the security and backup front as well.

Rich: Okay. Okay. Coming up in four or five weeks, it’s not that

Rania: far away. Yes, I know. We’re busy. Our teams are busy working to make it all happen and to bring these announcements to life.

Rich: Ranya, thank you so much for taking time out from a busy schedule, a busy day, and joining us here on the show.

For folks in the audience who wanna learn more about you, get in touch with you, where should they go?

Rania: I’ve been I’ve, it’s been feel free to reach out to me. It’s been wonderful to get to know so many MSP leaders in the industry since I joined. And with each conversation it’s becoming more and more clear about the tremendous opportunity we have to drive exceptional outcomes for MSPs and then customers.

So I look forward to hearing from more.

Rich: Alright, [00:50:00] Ranya Suncor, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Folks, we’re gonna take a quick break here. When we come back on the other side, I will be rejoined by Erick. We’ll share some thoughts about this very interesting conversation here. Have a little fun wrap up the show, stick around.

We’re gonna be right back

and welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast. And thanks once more to Ranya Sukar of Kaseya for joining us. She’s quite busy these days getting up to speed if she’s not a hundred percent already at Kaseya and da Ocon is coming up shortly.

So she had a very busy day. She was good enough to take an hour out of it at the very beginning of the day. We recorded around 8:00 AM and I do appreciate that. A ton of interesting stuff in there, Erick. And just so the audience knows, I actually wrote I had an extended post about this on my blog channel h I’ll link to that in the show notes for anyone who’s interesting about it.

I’ll just call out a few of the many noteworthy topics we got in [00:51:00] the into there. First of all we’ve spoken many times, we’ve spoken earlier on, on the show about the tools from companies like Kaseya, including Kaseya ConnectWise enable specialized vendors that are designed to help MSPs use AI to be more productive at the help desk and beyond, more productive internally.

This was the first time that I can think of. Where I had a conversation with the CEO of one of these big managed services software companies like ConnectWise, enable Ninja, et cetera, where there was clearly an effort coming to help MSPs sell AI through the. To their end users to build and deliver AI solutions and specifically agentic AI solutions.

At Kaseya is going to have an agent marketplace. This is something that PAX eight is building right now. It’s a classic Kaseya story, right? The difference between the Kase agent marketplace and anyone else’s out there is that it’s going to integrate more closely with everything in the Kaseya stack.

[00:52:00] And Kaseya for many years has been telling folks we want you to buy everything from us. And the advantage to you if you do that beyond the cost savings is the degree of integration you can get when you integrate at a source code level is beyond what you can do with a API. So naturally, as they get into customer facing ai and agents and agent marketplaces, that’s gonna be part of the story there.

Really interesting to me that their thinking as clearly, as seriously as they are around data consolidation and consolidating their own data, helping MSPs consolidate their data. That’s very useful stuff. But data consolidation as a sell through service to the end user is on the horizon as well.

And we know that one of those preconditions to an effective AI solution for an end user along with like security and governance and so on, is getting the data right. And k say is working on something that’s gonna help MSPs with that. And then there was some interesting stuff in there about moves that CASA will be [00:53:00] making that are really tailored to the needs of larger MSPs, these big roll-ups there.

And I wanna be careful not to insinuate that they’re gonna be playing favorites, that if you’re a smaller MSP, they’re not as in I didn’t pick up any of that, but I did pick up something that I know I just, and I can’t name names, but I know from conversations with people associated with some of these roll ops.

Has been a topic of frustration, which is we’re spending a lot of money ’cause we’ve got, a hundred MSPs or whatever it is in our rollup, and you’re just not listening to us from a roadmap standpoint, from a pricing standpoint. She, Sukar Hass picked that up already and she’s gonna be doing some things to accommodate some of that input.

A ton of interesting stuff I thought in the conversation, Erick. Awesome.

Erick: Yeah, this is a it’s a theme that we’re seeing, right? Rich. It’s like AI is this next, some people call it a bubble, some people call it, the next evolution, right? Folks that we respect deeply [00:54:00] are on both sides of this thing, right?

But what we do know is that the vendors that are really taking this seriously and being thoughtful about integrating AI and thinking about, data normalization and governance and things like that. Are the ones that’ll eventually suit their partners, the best rather than, some folks out there that, think they’re dropping, dot ai at the end of their name or their new product and kind of, doing a little bit of AI in there and then calling themselves an AI company might be doing.

What are your thoughts, rich?

Rich: Yeah yeah, we’ve spoken before a about this kind of moment here right now where the the big vendors need to be thinking. So there are all these nimble little startups out there that are doing very interesting things with ai. And there is a, an argument from an MSP standpoint for investing in those companies and taking advantage of those capabilities today.

Eventually the big vendors will be doing a lot of the same stuff, and they need to be thinking [00:55:00] about that now. And so it’s just interesting to see that in this one particular case they are thinking about this. And, Sukar has been the CEO there at least, officially, I don’t know when she started influencing or making decisions, but officially she became CEO in June.

So a lot of what we’re talking about here. Is stuff that probably predates her arrival. And we didn’t even get into the MCP interface and all that kind of stuff. But they are clearly thinking in a very serious way and a thoughtful way about the larger implications beyond making that tech more productive raised

Erick: by ai and they have to right Rich, because that’s just another potential, security vulnerability if done wrong.

And that’s the last thing, our vendors need right now is to, not be thoughtful and to rush, rush to deliver something that, maybe, could have been thought about a different way. And so I appreciate the the thought, thought thoughtfulness that these larger vendors are taking at this [00:56:00] point, because, holy cow, I know that, I don’t know about you, rich, it, months don’t go by without me getting some sort of an alert where my information has been caught up in some breach here or there or elsewhere, like all the time. And it’s unfortunately the world we live in, but again, partnering with the right vendors that have the right strategic perspective and are considerate about security and governance when delivering, something as potentially positively transformational as ai is good news.

Rich: Folks, with that we have time for just one last thing, and this week it comes to us from Stout in Wisconsin where investigators following some complaints from consumers did a little digging around and determined that the source of these complaints was famous Yeti’s Pizza in Stout in Wisconsin.

And the issue in particular, it turns out, is that the pizza dough at Famous Yeti’s was laced with THC the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis. Now it is [00:57:00] important to note this was not some. Plot it, this was an accident. Essentially it turns out that Famous Yeti shares an industrial kitchen with some other local businesses.

They were making their pizza dough one day. They ran out of oil, didn’t wanna fall behind on production, so they just borrowed some oil from one of the other companies that uses this kitchen, which turns out to be a company that makes cannabis edibles. And this oil was infused with THC. And so little did they know they were making piece of dough and garlic bread dough and sandwich dough with lots of THC in it.

Now, here’s what got my attention about this, Erick. It’s as I’m sure a lot of folks in the audience here are well aware. You get cannabis into your system in one way or another. And one of the symptoms you’re going to experience is what’s popularly known as the munchies. And when you get the munchies, you probably think about pizza, right?

So what happens if you eat [00:58:00] pizza? The pizza has THC, it gives you the munchies and you’re sitting in a pizzeria. I it just feels like an infinite loop. Or when do you stop eating pizza? At that point

Erick: I was thinking the exact same thing, rich and I’d love to see, sales that week, they must have been off of the charts as people kept ordering more pizza to address the munchies that they were experiencing by eating that same pizza.

Rich: We don’t endorse this as a sales or marketing idea for other pizzerias, but yeah I’ll, I’m with you. I’ll bet that was a record week at famous Yeti Pizza. Folks, that is all the time we’ve got for you this week on the show. We thank you for joining us. We’re gonna be back and a week with another episode for you.

Until then, I’ll just remind you, this is both a video and an audio podcast, which means if you happen to be listening to us right now, if you wanna check us out on video, go to YouTube. You’re gonna find MSP chat there. If you’re watching us on YouTube, but you’re into audio podcasts, go to Google, apple, Spotify, wherever it’s you, get your podcast.

You’ll [00:59:00] find us there too. And wherever you find us, please. Review subscribe. It’s gonna help other people like you find and enjoy the show. This show is produced by the Great Rust Johns. It is edited by the great Riley Simpson. They’re part of the team with us here at Channel Mastered. They can help you create a podcast if you’d like one.

And podcasts are the practically the most trivial thing we do for our clients here and at channel Mastered. To learn more, go to our website, which is www.channel Mastered.com. Channel Mastered has a sister organization, it’s called MSP Mastered. That is Erick working one-to-one with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business and discover that a 40% level two escalation rate is a problem.

You can learn more about that business at www.mspMastered.com. So once again, we thank you for joining us. See you in a week on our next show. Until then, please remember, as we always urge you to, you can’t spell channel. Without [01:00:00] MSP.