Kaseya has unveiled AI-based automation functionality for its integrated suite of RMM, PSA, backup, and other solutions.
The managed services software leader announced the forthcoming enhancement, which will begin rolling out in the final quarter of the year, alongside a new flexible payment plan for its backup solutions and a new PCI compliance offering, during its DattoCon partner conference in Miami.
Called Cooper Bots and available at no extra charge to Kaseya partners, the new no-code automation service will draw on artificial intelligence to handle rote tasks like onboarding new users and rotating passwords, so technicians don’t have to.
“Cooper Bots are fully fledged cross-functional business process automation bots that go beyond just suggesting things to do,” said Fred Voccola, Kaseya’s CEO, during a keynote presentation. “They do things for you if you want them to.”
The result can be significant productivity improvements, according to Ranjan Singh, Kaseya’s chief product officer. “It’s still early, but I would say you’d gain at least 20% efficiency,” he said during a conversation with ChannelPro.
MSPs can opt in or out of the various Cooper Bots that will eventually be available for everything from Kaseya’s RMM and PSA solutions to its KaseyaOne partner portal. The new functionality builds on the foundation Kaseya laid last June at its Connect IT event when it introduced the Cooper Intelligence Engine, an AI-powered service designed to point out product functionality that users are paying for but not benefitting from.
Pia and Rewst are leading names within a young cohort of vendors offering AI-inflected automation solutions for MSPs similar to Cooper Bots. According to Singh, however, those companies offer robotic process automation solutions, while Cooper Bots perform business process automation.
“We’re not saying, ‘click here, click here, click here. You’re going to take all these steps.’ We say, ‘we know exactly what you want to do, we’ve built the integrations, and now we are giving you an engine to just orchestrate those actions,'” he explains.
For his part, Charlie Tomeo, Rewst’s chief revenue officer, notes that Cooper Bots automate Kaseya products only, and not third-party solutions, during activities like provisioning new end users.
“If you ever do something outside of that, you’re not going to be able to do that part of the onboarding process,” he says. “That’s going to be a challenge.”
According to Singh, future Cooper Bots will automate a variety of common tasks in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure. Even further down the product roadmap are updates that will integrate Cooper Bots with the Microsoft 365 Copilot AI service so technicians can do parts of their job from directly inside Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications.
“This is the opposite of bringing Microsoft into IT Complete,” Singh says. “This is taking information from IT Complete and making it available in the Microsoft ecosystem so that technicians can action things there.”
Cooper is the name of Voccola’s dog, and an inspiration for a range of Kaseya initiatives beyond product names.
The new payment option for Kaseya’s unified backup product family, called FLEXspend for Backup, will allow MSPs to shift previously made spending commitments among on-premises and cloud-based BDR solutions from its Datto, Spanning, and Unitrends business units. According to Voccola, FLEXspend will reduce the risk MSPs currently take on when buying backup products amidst rapid adoption of cloud solutions by enabling them to reallocate those dollars as and when needed.
“You guys are sitting in a situation where things aren’t static and consistent, and it makes it really hard to make financial investments and financial commitments,” he said in his keynote. “We want to provide you the ability to move your investment among our backup portfolio as your customers are moving and as your demands change.”
The automated compliance service Kaseya announced today, named Secure Payments, is designed to confirm that end users in the retail industry and other verticals are meeting security requirements defined in the PCI standard. “If your customer is not PCI compliant, we will take the steps to make them PCI compliant, and we provide you the visibility to demonstrate that to your customers,” Voccola says.
Secure Payments builds on technology Kaseya acquired along with payments vendor ConnectBooster last year. According to Kaseya, 73% of SMBs who accept online payments aren’t PCI compliant, and 91% of those companies believe their MSP is responsible for keeping them compliant.
Voccola and Singh both discussed Kaseya’s evolving strategy for helping MSPs administer an expanding array of endpoints that now includes SaaS applications, cloud infrastructure solutions, IoT devices, and networking gear in addition to traditional desktops, laptops, and servers. Recent steps in that process include the addition of Microsoft 365 management to Datto RMM. Longer term, both that product and Kaseya’s VSA platform will provide comprehensive support for all of an MSP’s managed endpoints.
“Our strategy is what we call unified RMM,” said Voccola during his keynote. “Every type of endpoint [will be] covered in our RMM solutions, whether it’s a Mac, whether it’s network management products, whether it’s industrial IOT devices, whether it’s servers up in Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, whatever it may be.”
Kaseya outlined aspirations along these lines during a preview of VSA version 10 at last year’s Connect IT event. Most of that vision, including mobile device, IoT, and network device management, is now in place, according to Singh. The rest should arrive by the end of the year.
“The only thing I would say that’s outstanding in VSA 10 in terms of endpoint coverage is probably cloud,” Singh says. “That is going to probably come in December.”
Coming to Datto RMM by end of year as well, said Singh during his keynote, is advanced software management functionality for third-party cloud applications, including Box, Dropbox, Evernote, and Slack.
Augmentt, Nerdio, SkyKick, and other vendors are all part of a growing crop of cloud management specialists.
DattoCon 2023 concludes tomorrow. According to Voccola, Kaseya will continue to host DattoCon events, contrary to fears among Datto partners last year following Kaseya’s blockbuster $6.2 billion acquisition of Datto, “now and forever.”
