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General Information
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October 23, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 26
Page(s) 45 in print issue
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Put Your Systems On Autopilot
Kaseya’s IT Automation Software Improves IT Staff Effectiveness & Systems Performance
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 As IT environments grow, so do the tasks associated with managing them—often more than linearly, as many tasks involve interacting IT assets.
Kaseya (www.kaseya.com) provides IT automation software for about 5,000 service providers (including independent VARs) around the world as well as for enterprises such as FedEx and Kinko’s and for government agencies, hospitals, and other organizations.
Jim Alves is the executive vice president of product marketing at the company and a 30-year veteran of the computer industry who has been with the company since its first year.
 What are the biggest IT-related issues facing today’s small to midsized enterprise?
“The biggest issue for small and enterprise IT shops is that they have shrinking resources and budgets but don’t have shrinking business or user requirements,” says Alves. “So IT is concerned with the costs of maintaining machines, networks, and applications within the budget.”
Additionally, the law of diminishing returns applies to the amount that IT staff can do in serial fashion, says Alves. “People running around with checklists have varying amounts of skill and predictability, [so] you can’t be sure when or how well a task is being done.” The solution, according to Alves, is IT automation. “Automating day-to-day tasks improves IT staff productivity as well as improving systems performance.”
What should Processor readers know about your company’s products?
Kaseya’s IT automation framework products provide automatic and proactive monitoring, management, control, and maintenance for local, remote, and distributed IT assets, as either on-premises software or as managed services through a Web-based management console.
“We can monitor anything that uses SNMP,” says Alves. “We currently look at Windows and Mac machines and will soon also support Linux and mobile platforms.”
IT management tasks handled by Kaseya include departmental IT, backup and disaster recovery, user state management, endpoint security, patch management, and IT inventory asset management. “We provide the gamut of what an IT department does, automating the management and service of machines so the environment is more reliable, available, [and] secure, and most importantly, we help them provide a better experience for users.”
“We have people managing up to 1,000 machines,” Alves says. “And we have some service providers where one person is managing 5,000 machines, mostly because they’ve automated tasks. We provide the ability for them to do a lot more, with very little, and to do it better.”
Kaseya’s next release will include the next generation of its platform as well as applications to go with it. “We’ll have an array of SaaS-delivered services and also new on-premises features, along with a new user interface, a new service desk, new asset management, and a configuration management database, plus IT financial management tools for low- through high-end enterprises.”
What makes your company unique?
“We are a group of individuals who have worked with each other for many years—10, 20, even up to 25 years,” says Alves. “So we have a sense of trust and knowledge of what we’re capable of doing.”
Also, notes Alves, “We have people who are passionate about what they do. They’re interested in how to help IT professionals do their job. A lot of them were in IT or were IT users. We understand our customers and understand what they want.”
On the technical side, “We are not network-bound,” notes Alves. “We don’t require a continuous network or a VPN. As long as a system has our agent on it and can access the Internet, we can get to it without any ports or other changes needed.” 
by Daniel P. Dern
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