With its third annual user conference set to open to a record, sell-out crowd, Kaseya, the global leader in information technology (IT) automation software for IT solution providers and public and private sector IT organizations, today announced what it sees as a shift in industry trends towards consolidation in the Managed Services Provider (MSP) market. This is driven primarily by a maturing and highly-integrated platform for automating the management of key IT processes. While opportunities abound for MSPs who can deliver solutions that integrate their proprietary knowledge or capabilities with automated IT processes, MSPs who fail to integrate with a standard platform of IT services, or who cannot break out of the common reliance on “break fix” project work, risk being marginalized or pushed aside as the industry rushes to integrate.
Huge reductions offered in cost and complexity have made integration the predominant trajectory of the software industry. Operating systems, databases, middleware, tools and applications all began as fragmented markets characterized by partial, “siloed” solutions that could not interoperate. IT departments were left to integrate on their own, at great cost and complexity. The IT services market is no different in having begun as broadly different utilities that were interrelated, only to the extent that human processes established by IT departments provided the “glue” connecting them. The benefit to integrating IT procedures has been clear enough. The challenge originally was simply the amount of work involved in stitching together disparate solutions.
In the case of IT services, however, the speed at which the market is integrating is being driven not only by the orders of magnitude savings in cost and complexity that always drive integration, but also by the application of automation to the performance of highly standardizable and repeatable procedures that characterize the work of IT management. Rather than simply tie together things that previously had been disparate, vendors like Kaseya realized that automation across the IT function could greatly streamline IT services. Automation achieves this by eliminating many steps – and opportunities for error – that are only required when IT functions are treated as silos. In short, automation has accelerated the pace of integration for IT services. Since Kaseya was designed from the ground up as an integrated services platform, it has been able to deliver the efficiencies of full automation faster than other platforms or outdated solutions that simply darn together worn-out technology that was never conceived with the big picture in mind.
This phenomenon whereby automation accelerates the pace of integration presents tremendous opportunity for MSPs who position themselves to leverage it fully. While the largest software vendors will no doubt resort to acquisition to build out more complete IT management portfolios with software that will be integrated in brand name only, MSPs in general will have to find other means of competitive differentiation. By building their services on top of the Kaseya platform, with its open and robust API and its comprehensive range of solutions, MSPs have at their disposal an extremely fast means whereby they can deliver an end-to-end IT services offering. Liberated from the requirement to build a full offering of standard services around their unique IP, MSPs can achieve much faster time to market, higher specialization and greater profit margins.
Kaseya 6, being launched this week at Kaseya Connect 2009, provides greatly expanded integration of IT services and an enhanced API to greatly simplify delivering any automated IT services offering on top of the Kaseya platform.
“In the first five years of our history we have been laser-locked on leveraging our technology to help MSPs achieve solid business models with recurring revenues, and on applying automation techniques to reduce the cost of delivering services, thereby allowing MSPs to scale to even higher profitability,” said Gerald Blackie, chairman and CEO of Kaseya. “As we look forward to our next five years, we see an ever-quickening pace of integration driving industry consolidation and – more importantly – an almost limitless opportunity for smart MSPs to provide higher-value services to a rapidly expanding market in which they compete with many advantages over much larger vendors that are too tied to legacy offerings. Our MSP partners today can offer the same quality of service delivery as much bigger players and even be more fleet-of-foot at their ability to deliver new, differentiated services offerings. This will result in improved profitability for them as economies globally start emerging from the recession.”
For complete information about Kaseya Connect 2009 Las Vegas, please visit http://www.kaseyaconnect.com/ .
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About Kaseya
Kaseya is a global provider of IT automation software and services for IT Solution Providers and Public and Private Sector IT organizations. Kaseya’s IT Automation Platform allows IT Professionals to proactively manage and maintain distributed IT infrastructures remotely, easily and efficiently with one integrated Web based platform. Kaseya’s technology is licensed on over three million machines worldwide. For a free 30-day trial of the Kaseya solution, please visit http://www.kaseya.com/forms/free-trial.aspx