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Kaseya backup integrations a 'Done Deal'

The Kaseya backup line is growing, following the company’s acquisitions of two data protection vendors. Now Kaseya is adding a program that guarantees customers to managed service providers.

In 2018, the IT management firm acquired cloud-to-cloud backup vendor Spanning and backup and recovery provider Unitrends. Both Spanning and Unitrends continue to operate as a stand-alone independent business unit within Kaseya, which is based in New York City.

Spanning, which backs up data stored in SaaS applications such as Office 365, Salesforce and G Suite, is a quickly surging part of Kaseya business.

“The Office 365 market is on fire,” said Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola.

Kaseya acquired Spanning in October. At the same time, it also launched Kaseya Office 365 Backup powered by Spanning.

On the Unitrends front, Voccola said Kaseya uses Unitrends technology throughout its product offerings.

“IT is getting more complex than it’s ever been. It’s great technology and it’s also easy,” Voccola said of Unitrends.

Kaseya backup offering a ‘Done Deal’

Kaseya backup is aiming to make the customer acquisition process easier for managed service providers (MSPs) with a new “Done Deal” program that officially launched this month.

The program contractually commits Kaseya to provide a paying customer to the MSP within 90 days.

Voccola said many MSP leaders struggle with sales and marketing.

“Very rarely are they professionally trained, go-to-market executives,” he said.

Unitrends MSP CEO Mike Sanders added: “They have an opportunity to get in front of new customers, which is the single most difficult thing MSPs go through.”

Voccola would not publicly disclose details about how Kaseya gets the customers to MSPs. Kaseya, though, plans on providing 3,000 customers over the next year. A typical customer is an SMB looking to work with an MSP, Voccola said.

The Unitrends and Kaseya backup program is out in North America as well as part of the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) market. Kaseya is looking to launch it in more of EMEA and beyond in 2019.

“I’ve never seen a program receive as much enthusiasm as this,” Voccola said.

Kaseya claims about 15,000 MSP customers.

Kaseya and Unitrends look ahead

Sanders said that while there is a lot of synergy between Unitrends and Kaseya, Unitrends’ independence from its owner is a major reason why the integration is going smoothly.

“You hear a lot of acquisition stories that don’t go this way,” Sanders said.

Unitrends is looking to use Kaseya technology more in its product set. It’s also looking for more opportunities like the Done Deal program. Sanders said he has a couple of product ideas and anticipates announcements over the next few months.

Kaseya’s acquisition of Unitrends brought together remote monitoring and management, endpoint management, network monitoring and management, professional services automation, security, and backup and disaster recovery. The Kaseya backup acquisition was similar to the 2017 merger of IT management provider Autotask and data protection vendor Datto.

Sanders referred to Datto as his company’s biggest competition.

Edwin Yuen, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said that while the convergence of data protection and data management has been a key trend lately, it’s starting to go a step further.

“Data protection is now becoming part of systems’ management as a whole,” Yuen said.

That includes security, compliance, backup and recovery all working together, and an overall better understanding of applications and systems.

“That’s something you’ll see more,” Yuen said.

Voccola said in the next year he anticipates Kaseya will make several more acquisitions.

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