The latter part of 2009 signals an important transition period for Kaseya. Our first five years have been characterized by a single-minded focus on taking our initial technology and applying it to solving the needs of the emerging IT Managed Service Provider marketplace. Those needs revolved around two elements:
As a company, we've achieved these goals, though the industry remains heavily mired in break-fix and project based services (hourly billing) for its revenues.
There is still a lot of work to do to bring along the rest of the industry. For those early adopters of IT Managed Services who are utilizing Kaseya, there is a need to grow beyond the now obvious aspects of client-side automation.
Full-blooded automation must come to pass and Kaseya believes this is best expressed in a Resource Planning context. However, for fully optimized Resource Planning to be effective and for automation to drive best practices, such as ITIL, another concept needs to find full expression in the industry: full, system-wide integration of all systems driving the IT managed service practice.
The second five years of this industry will be characterized by the emergence of IT Resource Planning ("ITRP"). This concept is unashamedly borrowed from ERP and will be the primary driver of consolidation in the vendor ranks as well as of true long-term competitive advantage for managed services providers. Just as the emergence of the major ERP vendors saw the disappearance of specialty application vendors, the rise in ITRP will be swift and equally unforgiving to those who cannot adapt quickly. Without an ITRP framework driving its business, the managed services provider conducting business the old way will not survive against competition that can drive a broad spectrum of high quality services at a fraction of the operating cost of the non-ITRP shop.
Consolidation will be the "elephant in the room" over the next five years. Building on the theme of ITRP, new efficiencies and greater profits will drive this consolidation. We are already seeing the start of this trend at Kaseya. Tata Consulting Service has announced that Tata has chosen Kaseya as the core IT managed services platform to support their launch of their "IT-as-a-Service" business in India. This announcement shows that the big players are starting to see an opportunity to expand their business in the SMB space, sized at $888 Billion worldwide. Effectively the largest IT group in India, Tata expects to be a dominant MSP in the Indian market. Tata is going it alone as the MSP market in India is not mature enough to acquire a base of business.
Consolidation will happen at an increasing pace over the next five years and as the financial markets rebound to health it is not hard to see a series of independent "roll-ups" occurring as IPO's. The only way for the current MSP community to survive, let alone prosper, is to grow larger and offer more and better services to the customer, all the while preparing for the coming opportunities. Adding proprietary process, procedures and policies to a framework like Kaseya is a great way to add intellectual property value to the MSP's own portfolio. So, Kaseya's evolving ITRP platform is at the heart of making this possibility a reality for the MSP.
For complete information about Kaseya Connect 2009, please visit http://www.kaseyaconnect.com.
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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