Kaseya Ltd. has created an online marketplace that enables MSPs to share, buy, and sell scripts, monitoring sets, agent procedures, and other resources for automating managed service processes.
Called Automation Exchange and available free of charge to the Dublin, Ireland-based managed service software maker’s partners, the site includes functionality for listing, finding, rating, and reviewing tools that can help managed service providers expand their customer base and increase their profitability by streamlining regularly-performed tasks.
“You can kind of get away with operating on raw talent and raw skill and just really hard work up to a certain number of end points,” observes Fred Tisellano, Kaseya’s senior director of product management. “Automation is essential to success at scale.”
Many MSPs, however, either don’t know how to automate workflows or don’t have time to do it, he continues. Automation Exchange is designed to be a quick and easy way to get started.
It can also help MSPs who are especially skilled at automation monetize that talent by selling scripts and other tools to their peers.
“There’s still really an untapped market where more mature MSPs that maybe have full-time developers in house have an opportunity to be selling automation to the huge number of smaller MSPs that are out there,” Tisellano says, noting that while the site collects a small fee to cover credit card processing costs, 100 percent of the remaining revenue flows straight through to sellers.
“Kaseya does not take a cut of any sales,” he states.
Users can set fees for paid listings anywhere they choose. At present, prices range from $1 for simple items all the way up to $4,000 for an entire suite of tools.
“We really haven’t seen it settle down in a particular place,” Tisellano notes.
Over 90 percent of the automations currently available through the site are free, however. Quietly launched 2 months ago, Automation Exchange already has some 250 listings, as well as 700 users who have performed over 2,000 unique downloads to date.
There is no fee for adding a listing. Kaseya checks new automations for viruses and objectionable content, but doesn’t do the kind of extensive vetting Apple performs before adding new products to its App Store.
It will, however, attach a “Kaseya Certified” stamp of approval to selected automations that it vets more thoroughly. Automation submitters can request that service, which is free, but Kaseya will perform it only for automations it considers especially noteworthy.
According to Tisellano, Kaseya partners have been swapping scripts with one another for some time. Automation Exchange is an effort to formalize that process and make it simpler.
“We really see it as kind of an extension of the existing kind of sharing that our customers have been doing,” he says. “We thought “we can improve this experience.'”
Doing so benefits Kaseya as well by encouraging MSPs to take advantage of tools that can help them grow their business and buy more managed services software.
“We want to help our customers grow so that we can grow too,” Tisellano says.
Interestingly, Kaseya left its brand out of the Automation Exchange name deliberately in case it decides to add automations for products from other vendors, like Microsoft PowerShell scripts, in the future. That’s one of many additions to the system Kaseya is considering.
“It’s still early days and we’re kind of letting the market tell us how this should work,” Tisellano says.
