It used to be only larger companies that really needed to worry about IT systems support. Ten or even five years ago most small businesses had relatively limited deployment of business applications and communications networks, such that even complete systems failure would be more of an inconvenience than a catastrophe. Not anymore.
With the increased reliance on everything from CRM and ERP systems to web-based applications and now the cloud, systems downtime can be very damaging if not fatal for small organisations.
Even so, few SMBs have the necessary resources to properly manage their systems themselves, and it is this gap which is creating lucrative new opportunities for Australian resellers.
Perth-based Leap Consulting is one of a small group of integrators at the vanguard of this emerging market. Honoured in last year’s CRN Top 50, the company enjoys growing revenue streams from its systems support business.
Providing the back-end for Leap’s service offering is software from US-based developer Kaseya, which is emerging as one of the world’s leading IT support platforms for companies large and small.
Taken from the language of the native American Sioux tribe, the word “kaseya” means to secure and protect. The company launched in Australia and New Zealand in 2006 and since then has managed to sign up more than 500 managed service providers including Leap.
Kaseya markets its next generation K2 framework as allowing partners to transition from the traditional “break-fix” approach to IT services towards offering a more comprehensive set of managed services.
With the break-fix model, companies really only have insight into the health of their IT systems once they actually fail. With managed services, however, they have the opportunity of virtually eliminating downtime for a fraction of what such services used to cost, while the reseller gets to establish an ongoing annuity.
Kaseya’s core offering is Kaseya Master IT Service Provider Edition, which features everything from audit and discovery, remote control/support and patch management to systems monitoring, software deployment, help desk and trouble ticketing, and policy enforcement.
In 2009 Western Australia ended a three-year trial of daylight saving time, with a popular vote to consign the idea to history. “We had to change systems for all clients to roll back times so that their appointment would correspond,” recalls Leap Consulting’s operations director, Zaun Bhana.
In the past the company would have had to allocate an engineer to manually update each client, a time- consuming as well as unpleasant task especially since Leap has more than 60 clients in WA.
Using Kaseya Leap was instead able to create a script to go into each client’s systems and download a patch, all with the push of a button. “We saved a huge amount of time,” says Bhana. The same method is used to provide software installations, updates and patches.
But it was the realisation that more and more small businesses were demanding 24/7 support that set Leap on an interesting new course.
“What small business operators get especially frustrated with is they get to work on Monday and the system’s not working, meaning they have to go through all the hassle of contacting their external IT guy, and all the while every minute of downtime is costing them money,” Bhana explains.
But Leap knew it wouldn’t be viable for it to pay for staff to deliver on a promise of 24/7 support. That’s when they entered into an agreement with Kaseya whereby the software company would provide an outsourced service to Leap.
It’s an unusual arrangement, and one which initially presented challenges. “We had to ensure we aligned the services and the expectation of our clients so that what we get from Kaseya as a service matches what we deliver as a service,” Bhana recalls. “There was a lot of dialogue between our two companies at the start.”
For instance Leap was often going back to Kaseya to tweak settings, especially in terms of defining and prioritising the sort of information the company wanted and just as importantly, when and how that information was to be sent.
“You need to set when exactly you would receive alerts,” Bhana explains. “When we first started we were getting phone calls at two in the morning. That’s fine if you’re working for, say, a hospital but most professional services people don’t want to be called in the middle of the night. This is what we needed to set right.”
Now, the managers or owners of Leap’s clients are often arriving to open the doors for the day only to find that an engineer is waiting for them to fix a problem even they aren’t yet aware of.
“Instead now a notification is generated so that the IT guy will be there when he’s opening the doors on Monday.”
A small business customer of Leap’s recently had a Dell server bite the dust over the weekend. Kaseya notified Leap who immediately contacted Dell to be told that the server was still under warranty. “Dell dispatched an engineer that morning to replace the server just as the client was opening the office. There was no downtime and the client didn’t even know. We even went a further step to email the client and notify them that Dell was on the way.”
Bhana explains that previously he would need to have staff monitoring all the alerts as they came in. “It was very low level work.” Not only that, there was a high number of false alerts.
In 2008 Leap joined a number of other companies beta testing Kaseya’s 24/7 product, named Virtual Monitoring which allowed service providers to make very specific settings.
“The big thing for us was filtering false alarms; the number of false alarms we used to get was massive. This [going with Kaseya] was a huge saving.”
Kaseya IT Services team currently provides L1 and L2 services (virtual monitoring and virtual management) to 1046 servers and workstations in APAC – that’s the second highest uptake after North America worldwide.
Kaseya IT Services operates behind the scenes with no direct contact to the managed service provider’s end customer. While Kaseya's support team delivers the 24/7 support, the MSPs retain full control over usage, data collection, and end customer interaction.
Further bolstering the suite, early last year Kaseya launched its Virtual Engineer product which allows service providers to deliver even more responsive 24/7 monitoring and resolution of IT issues, including better management of escalation, patch management, backup and security.
Bhana estimates that without Kaseya it would cost him possibly an extra $80,000 a year to offer the same level of service. “Before going with Kaseya we would have needed a full time junior on around $40,000, and possibly a second.” Now the company has one staffer spending about 30 percent of his time checking the incoming reports.
Before settling with Kaseya, Leap tried software from various vendors. “But we wanted something that was more scalable and reliable,” explains Bhana. “We wanted to take what we saw in the high end and bring it down.”
Bhana says these days most companies with 20 or more staff need a professional level of systems monitoring and remediation. “It’s just around that size IT forms enough of a requirement to have external level of service around monitoring because the cost of downtime is significantly larger.”
This translates into attractive opportunities for skilled integrators, especially given that while most companies appreciate the importance of reducing downtime, few have the sort of understanding to achieve this on their own.
Leap now derives around 45 percent of its revenue from managed services and has grown 20 percent year-on-year since signing on with Kaseya in 2006. Its net margin is around 10 percent, but the company expects that figure to double in the next few years.
Former IBM executive Dermot McCann came on board as managing director Kaseya Australia/New Zealand in February. He says the company is preparing to make a number of significant announcements at its global user conference scheduled for Las Vegas in May. Also due to be announced are innovations with regard to delivering and supporting Kaseya in the cloud. “Kaseya is releasing a steady roadmap of new technologies and has invested heavily in support,” McCann says.
Included on this roadmap, McCann says, are new solutions – both on-premise and cloud- based – aimed at improving the performance of applications and systems running on key mobile platforms. “We see that the need for better mobile management is becoming a reality and we have technology ready to help manage a multitude of mobile platforms,” he says, adding that key announcements are expected to be made in Q2.
Also in the offing from Kaseya are new modules addressing security concerns including anti-virus, anti-malware and data backup. A further string to the company’s bow, due to be detailed soon, is a module for helping companies managed things such as staff registration.
To date Kaseya has deployed about 250,000 agents [seats] in Australia via a client base of roughly 500 managed service providers. Worldwide, Kaseya engineers manage more than 3600 servers with 500,000 mailboxes, not including thousands of other machines.
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