What’s Changing and What’s Not at Kaseya

Kaseya’s Fred Voccola explains what he’ll be doing in his new job. Plus: Kaseya’s next big product news, Cytracom and AvePoint on platform, and Ingram Micro on AI proof of concept success.

Like it or not, Kaseya partners, Fred Voccola isn’t going anywhere.

To be sure, he’s no longer the managed services giant’s CEO, as we all learned to our surprise two weeks and a day ago today. But he’ll still be actively engaged as commander-in-chief of the company’s multi-year strategy for growing from today’s $1.5 billion in revenue to $10 billion.

“What’s the direction of our products, where do we take the platform, what markets to enter, pricing, all those kinds of things,” said Voccola of the decisions he’ll be leading during an interview for the podcast I co-host. “Acquisitions. M&A. What do we want to add into the platform? How quickly do you want to build AI?”

What he won’t be responsible for anymore is the daily grind of managing a growing organization with 5,000 employees and a sprawling portfolio of solutions used by more than 40,000 businesses worldwide.

“It’s been an 80 hour a week job for 10 plus years, and I mean a legit 80 hours a week,” Voccola (pictured above) says. “It’s a lot.” His new role will give him more time to focus on the parts of his job he’s been most passionate about since he became CEO a decade ago.

Here are a few other things I learned in the course of my interview:

The news arrived abruptly for us, but not for Kaseya’s board. “It’s something we’ve had in the works for a while,” says Voccola of the CEO switch.

Since last April, more specifically, when Voccola unveiled the first major component of Kaseya 365, a tightly integrated, heavily automated, disruptively priced platform designed to help MSPs raise average margins from what Kaseya says is currently 10% to 35% or beyond. Launching that product, which took 11 years of effort, inspired 18 acquisitions, and cost well over $12 billion, seemed to Voccola like a good moment to have a frank conversation with his fellow board members.

“I said, ‘I don’t know how much longer I’m going to run the day-to-day operations of this great company,’” he recalls.

Kaseya has been preparing for the big announcement for a while. In part by “upgrading the executive team’s talent,” Voccola says. Indeed, the company’s COO/CFO, CMO, and chief human resources officer, among others are all less than a year on the job. “All this has been done over the last 10 months as we knew that we were going to be making this transition,” Voccola says.

Announcing Voccola’s exit as CEO before choosing a successor was a carefully made decision. The goal, according to Voccola, was to give partners time to digest the fact that someone new would be running the company soon.

“The alternative approach, which some companies choose to do and there’s no right or wrong way of doing it, is you wake up tomorrow and there’s a new CEO of the company that is your most strategic partner,” Voccola says. “It’s like, ‘holy smokes, what just happened?’”

Kaseya’s being extremely methodical about picking a new CEO. “This is a very, very careful, well-orchestrated process, so we don’t cause friction and we don’t break what’s working,” says Voccola, who declined to discuss the company’s selection criteria beyond this: “I assure you that the candidate and the person that we bring in, whoever he or she may be, will be 100% focused on the channel, on the partners.”

They’ll also, given the job’s operational focus, be particularly skilled at operational leadership.

“Providing a platform that changes the unit economics is half the battle,” Voccola says, referencing the challenge he’ll be most focused on. “The other half of the battle is making Kaseya the easiest, simplest, most friendly company to work with.”

Whoever gets hired won’t come from within. Because for all the talent Kaseya has on staff, the company’s board believes no one there now has the experience or skill set to run a business this large and complex.

“There’s not a lot of people that have run a 5,000-person software company,” Voccola says. “We didn’t believe we had anybody internally that would be the right candidate.”

Voccola knows more about what he’ll do with the extra time at his disposal than he wants to share right now. “There’s some very specific plans that will be happening over the next several years,” is all he’ll say for the moment.

Voccola had personal as well as professional reasons for down-shifting to a more strategic position. “10 years is a long time,” he says, especially at 80 hours a week. “I just knew that there’s a lot of things in life that I wanted to do.” A death in the family last October left him even more certain it was time for a change.

“I lost my father and my best friend,” Voccola says. “I was lucky enough to be there and spend a lot of time with him at the very, very end of his life.” The loss reminded him of a truth that we’d all do well to remember.

“There’s only so much money you can make in life.”

Get ready for “the end game of end games”

What debuted as Kaseya 365 last April officially became Kaseya 365 Endpoint last October during a partner conference in which Kaseya released a security-focused companion named Kaseya 365 User. Voccola dropped a big loud hint about that release three months in advance during an earlier podcast appearance. Would he drop a hint about impending product news once more three months before another big conference?

Why yes, in fact, he would. “You know me well now,” Voccola says. “It’s hard for me to keep my mouth shut, and I’m not going to.”

So while I didn’t get details, Voccola did reveal that there’s yet another major release of some kind coming soon, and it will apparently be big.

“The impact will be a 5x impact [of] Kaseya 365 Endpoint and User combined,” he says. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is the end game of end games.”

Which is saying something, because Kaseya believes K365 Endpoint and User are currently on track to put $1 billion a year of incremental profit in the pockets of Kaseya partners through license savings and productivity gains. Will the new thing coming in the spring really yield $5 billion a year?

“Easy,” Voccola says.

You really should be listening to the podcast I keep plugging

Fred Voccola isn’t the only big shot to appear on the show. WatchGuard’s CEO, Google’s channel chief, HP’s chief commercial officer, Pax8’s president/chief commerce officer, N-able’s CISO, and many others have appeared too. Check it out here.

How do AvePoint and Cytracom define platform?

I posted a video last week about two acquisitions announced within 24 hours of one another, one from Cytracom and the other from AvePoint. Each was interesting in its own right, but what motivated me to talk into a camera about them for several minutes is that the press releases about both transactions employed a word you’re probably tiring of hearing from me: platform.

Cytracom, in explaining why it purchased security risk management vendor Telivy, said the deal marks “another milestone in the company's evolution to deliver a comprehensive technology platform for MSPs,” and AvePoint said its deal reflects the vendor’s “continued commitment to provide Managed Services Providers with an AI-driven platform to manage, optimize, and secure clients’ IT environments.”

Their platform-building ambitions are far from unique, of course. Ingram Micro is building its future around a platform, as are Kaseya and ConnectWise and many, many others.

There are several reasons why, beginning with the fact that MSPs want it. “They don’t want to deal with so many different vendors, so many different support teams, so many different APIs,” says Scott Sacket (pictured), AvePoint’s SVP of partner strategy.

Furthermore, adds Cytracom COO John Tippett, they want the operational efficiency gains that tightly integrated products help provide.

“What MSPs have always pushed for, even back in the days when I was running an MSP, is efficiency and integration,” he says. “I don’t want to spend a lot of time, labor, and energy to achieve a billable outcome. If I can find something that gets me all the way there or most of the way there, it’s highly appealing.”

Makes sense. But with everyone from Ingram to Palo Alto to ScalePad talking platform, attaching a specific, useful definition to the term is growing harder and harder. So how does Cytracom define it?

“Our view on that is that a platform for MSPs is a purpose-focused group of solutions,” Tippett says, versus a point solution.

That’s an expansive enough view, helpfully, to accommodate both the broad platforms N-able and Syncro, say, offer and the much more targeted platform Cytracom is constructing, which started with unified communications at the company’s founding in 2008 before proceeding to SASE in 2022. The connection between those seemingly unrelated solutions is that UCaaS users need secure, high-speed connectivity of the kind SASE enables. Telivy’s software, according to Tippett, is a logical extension to the platform that helps MSPs provide an objective, fact-based assessment of why prospective clients need SASE.

“They can see where there are vulnerabilities, where there are risks that need to be addressed, and they can use that to base their conversation around why they need to join the managed services plan,” Tippett explains.

AvePoint’s definition of platform is different and much more like Ingram’s. Just as Xvantage, the “digital twin” offering centralized, self-serve access to everything the distributor does in one place, AvePoint’s Elements platform provides centralized access to everything MSPs need to migrate and protect data in Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce.

“For us, the platform is the product,” Sacket says. “We are, from one unified place, solving many different challenges for our partners in a wide range of ways.” Ydentic expands the range by adding multi-tenant cloud management for Microsoft-first MSPs. Elements will gain further abilities as well in the future.

“In the data protection space, there are loads of great data protection products. In the migration space, there are several. In the governance space, there are more,” Sacket says. “Being able to do it in this consolidated robust one pane of glass, I think, is the future.”

Cytracom similarly aspires to free MSPs from “bouncing between portals and vendors,” Tippett says. “It should all just automatically work.”

Tips for achieving AI POC ROI

Three facts about agentic AI (a technology we’ve written about here at length recently): it’s very new, it’s very complex, and 25% of business worldwide will deploy it in proof-of-concept form this year, according to Deloitte.

And here’s a fourth, unfortunate fact based on a conversation late last year with Marty Bauerlein, chief commercial officer at distributor D&H: a lot of those agentic AI POCs will fail.

Indeed, in D&H’s experience, 60% of all AI POCs, at larger organizations anyway, fail at present. “That happens in any IT environment,” Bauerlein observes. “But if the failure rate is above 40%, the word’s going to get out quickly, and we’ve got to get that failure rate down on these large deployments.”

Sanjib Sahoo (pictured), who was recently named president of Ingram Micro’s Global Platform Group and who, more than anyone else at the distribution giant is responsible for the development of its AI-heavy Xvantage platform, has more than a little experience in this area and a success rate well above 40%. So during a recent visit to Ingram’s HQ, I asked him for a few thoughts on what makes AI POCs work. Here are five of his specific suggestions.

1. Start with strategy. According to Sahoo, companies too often begin their journey to AI by asking, “what should we do with AI?” They should be asking “what business problems need solving” instead.

“We generally start with an AI strategy and try to fit our business into that,” Sahoo says. “We need to start with the business strategy and try to fit in AI.” Accelerating workflows, scaling growth, and enhancing customer service, he adds, are all good, AI-friendly strategic objectives to consider.

2. Specify your goals. Once you know where you’re trying to go with your POC, Sahoo says, step two is agreeing on how you’ll know if you got there.

“Figure out what are the metrics and KPIs that will show success,” he says.

3. Think big, start small. By all means, Sahoo remarks, set ambitious targets and lofty success criteria for AI in the long term. You’ll be better off in the short term, however, defining modest goals for a POC with equally modest expectations.

“The mistake is we aim for perfection,” Sahoo says of AI. “You have to ease into it in such a way that you are learning and performing as you’re transforming.”

4. Data comes first. Sahoo was a team of one when he became Ingram’s chief digital officer in 2021. The first hire he made was a chief data officer.

“You can write a nice, fancy AI algorithm, but to make AI successful, the scale and quality of data is very important,” Sahoo says. His boss, Ingram CEO Paul Bay, agrees.

“At the end of the day, what we’re doing around AI, all the buzzwords that are going on in the industry, it’s a matter of you’ve got to have the right data and you’ve got to have clean data,” he says.

5. Security comes a close second. In AI as elsewhere, where data goes, data security must follow.

“What is mission critical data? What is non-mission critical data? What is sensitive data? What is not?” Sahoo asks. Ponder such questions before you build, he continues, and turn the answers into a concrete data protection and governance plan.

“You have to put the structure and security in place,” Sahoo says.

Also worth noting

• ConnectWise has a new CRO and SVP of go-to-market operations.

• Speaking of ConnectWise, CrashPlan is its newest integration partner.

• The strategic integration that Guardz and SentinelOne announced last April is now in market for the first time.

• Larry Meador is the new channel chief at Cavelo.

• OpenAI will play a strategic role in LogicMonitor’s move to bring agentic AI to IT management.

• Proofpoint security solutions are now available through Ingram Micro’s Xvantage platform.

• ServiceNow says the partner program expansion it announced this week nearly quadruples its investment in incentives and specializations.

• Granite Telecommunications is now an authorized reseller for satellite internet service provider Starlink.