Kaseya 2 Improves Remote Access, Adds ITIL Service Desk

Calling it the biggest revision since the product was created, Kaseya is rolling out Kaseya 2 – a major update to its remote monitoring and managed services platform.

Kaseya’s new release features new database architecture, a new user interface and navigation; a new security model; a new way to set up groups, departments and locations; and a new application within the framework called LiveConnect.

And it’s probably the remote access tool that has existing Kaseya MSPs most excited about the new release.

“The biggest feature I’ve been excited about has been the LiveConnect piece,” Rob Leon, vice president of operations at inhouseIT told Channel Insider. The Orange County, Calif.-based MSP is one of Kaseya’s beta customers for the new release. Leon says the remote access tool will be a big time saver because it shows the client’s screen refreshed on a timed basis so administrators can view what’s going on at the client desktop. (The previous version only offered logs of what was going on at remote clients.)

Leon is also a fan of the new reporting functions in Kaseya 2 which enable him to set up scheduled reports that get dropped into his inbox.

The new database architecture features an entirely new schema that allows Kaseya 2 to handle the demands of SAAS-required multi-tenant architecture.

Kaseya 2 also adds a new ITIL-based template-based service desk along with its ticketing functions, according to Jim Alves, executive vice president for product marketing at Kaseya.

“Kaseya 2 is built to handle thousands of machines and millions of users,” he told Channel Insider. “We can scale this up to market to enterprises and down to the SOHO user.”

Part of that entails simplifying the user interface for smaller customers to make it easier for them to use.

Kaseya is offering a Master IT services edition for pure play managed services providers; an IT Center edition for the managed services provider; and a free offering on a SAAS basis for up to 25 computers.

“We always had a free trial of a fully functional system,” Alves said. “But we’ve never had a free forever version like this one.”

He says it’s designed to get the product out there and show people its capabilities.

“It gets people exposed to remote management capabilities,” he said. “For some people, that’s all they’ll need. For others, they will say they need more features of the paid version.”

Alves says the changes don’t represent so much a change in pricing but more of a change in how target markets can consume the product and service.

“If you look at the lower end service provider. They want something that they can pay as they go, pay as they grow. Cash flow doesn’t allow them to do that right now. But a larger service provider will say they have the volume to pay for that.”

The overall platform, segmented into versions to support these types of different customers, is designed to meet the needs of all these markets.

“This is a huge release for us,” Alves said. “It sets the foundation of growth for everybody. Not only growth in the market, but growth in the applications we can provide to the users. The whole goal in our systems is automate as much of the work as possible and make it consistent and repeatable so that people don’t have to do it.”

 

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