Kaseya is taking the Home Depot approach to managed services for businesses that prefer to keep systems monitoring and management in-house.

The San Francisco-based managed services platform vendor this week launches a do-it-yourself program to fulfill a need with customers that prefer not to rely on an IT services company for monitoring services.

Kaseya's channel partners, who typically offer the vendor's technology as a service to customers, still play a role in the new program. They stand to earn profit margins of at least 25 percent by reselling the software, said Bill Falk, Kaseya's vice president of sales.

"With this program, partners can be flexible," said Falk. "They can listen to the customer and go in whatever direction they choose."

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Under managed services, solution providers take over some or all of their customers' IT functions and keep tabs on the systems performance through remote monitoring. Providers charge customers utility-like monthly fees for the service.

Through Kaseya's new program, end-user customers will oversee the functions the providers normally handle. The vendor's software automates daily IT tasks and uses a system of reports and alerts to keep IT administrators abreast of a computing environment's performance.

Falk said even though customers keep the oversight of these functions in-house, the solution provider still has an opportunity to deliver value-added services, such as writing scripts, implementation and training.

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"The bottom line is that the service provider has an opportunity to resell a license, make margin on that and add services," he said.

The do-it-yourself approach has worked for Kaseya partner Avrio Group, of Easton, Md. The solution provider has given customers the option of keeping oversight of the automated tasks since it got into managed services about three years ago, said Avrio President Darrin Lipscomb.

"We do the monitoring mainly for smaller customers that don't have an IT department," he said. "Then we resell the product for the larger customers."

On average, he said, customers that choose to purchase have at least 100 seats.

Falk said customers that opt for the do-it-yourself approach eventually may decide to outsource to a managed services provider. And since they are likely to go with the provider who sold them the software, the providers get a foot in the door with the initial sale, he said.

Lipscomb said that has not been his experience. But the reverse has happened; one customer opted to take the monitoring in-house after outsourcing it to Avrio for a while.

Avrio does about 8 to 10 percent of its overall business, primarily focused on banks and government agencies, through the managed services model. The company adds six to 10 managed services customers a year, he said.

"It's a steady growth thing," he said. "IT's not something that's going to spike all of a sudden."

Kaseya's new program offers partners two levels of participation—Gold and Platinum. Typical Gold Partners, according to the vendor, are integrators with the sales, marketing and technical resources to sell and support the vendor's technology. Platinum Partners have the same capabilities but also the capacity to market the technology to larger organizations.