In a significant shift in strategy, MSP platform vendor Kaseya is building a business transformation consulting program similar to those offered by rival vendors.
To drive the new program, Kaseya has hired Tim McMullen to be its new COO, the San Francisco-based company said this week. McMullen has been given a roughly $1 million budget to spend in 2007 on what he called Kaseya's "business re-engineering" program.
"Teaching partners how best to transform their businesses" into MSPs will be the primary goal of Kaseya's business re-engineering program, according to McMullen.
As managed services adoption took off over the last year and a half, the popular conception became that two elements are required for solution providers to become successful MSPs: remote IT network monitoring and remediation products, and migrating from a reactive, break-and-fix model to a proactive one that regularly bills customers on a fixed-fee basis.
Kaseya recognized in late 2006 that it needed to begin pushing its products and a business transformation process side-by-side, in a way similar to MSP platform vendors N-able Technologies and Silverback Technologies, McMullen said.
McMullen, who officially began work Jan. 1, has already hired two trainers who will help spearhead Kaseya's business re-engineering program. Two more trainers will likely be hired this year, he said.
A round-the-clock partner support offering also will be put in place this year, giving partners consistent after-hours support that's currently not available from Kaseya, McMullen said.
Whether Kaseya -- considered one of the more expensive MSP platforms on the market -- will charge partners extra for the business re-engineering program has not yet been determined, McMullen said. The vendor may decide to bury the cost of the program into its products, which start at about $12,000.
The MSP boom of the past year was good to Kaseya, which this week announced a 330 percent increase in bookings in 2006. McMullen said that even though he has no direct experience in transforming a solution provider to an MSP, experience he has in various other areas of transforming business practices qualify him to tackle Kaseya's business re-engineering program.
McMullen was most recently a senior vice president of products and alliances at Talisma, a CRM product vendor in Bellevue, Wash. He also served as a director and adviser for Omni Vista Software and Captura Software.
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