Kaseya Africa Highlights
- Targets Managed Service Providers
- Focuses on creating a community, not a channel
- Sees new communications opening up the African market – especially in mobile solutions
- MSPs can make up for the dearth of technical experties
- Thabo Mbeki’s initiatives to create standards of governance, agreements and freedom are central to economic developments in Africa
Kaseya’s Garth Hayward
You may already have read our analysis of Kaseya’s BYOD and mobile systems management strategy. We recently had a hands-on closer look at its software up in London. Even most recently we talked to its African head, Garth Hayward. You’ll be interested in finding out more about how a small company approaches the region and his observations of the drivers, state of adoption and hurdles.
Kaseya Focused Efforts On Creating A Community, Not A Channel – Targets MSPs
Garth was appointed to start the SA operation just over 3 years ago, coming from an outsourcing background at Centricity. Kaseya Africa currently has 7 staff covering pre- and post-sales, training, marketing and sales itself – so minute in comparison with HP and IBM featured by us earlier.
Garth says the region simply “doesn’t have enough of the required IT technical skills”, which provides a strong rationale for build a business in systems management.
From the outset, rather than create a distribution channel, Kasey created a community of like-minded service companies, who wanted to optimize, automate and grow their client base without increasing their respective technical staff overhead. Today Kaseya has over 120 MSP partners delivering services to around 4,500 companies across 24 African countries.
On the sales front its initial approach was to target Service Providers where he reports some partners experiencing growth of up to 500% over the past 3 years (from a small base no doubt). For these customers Kaseya’s productivity tools mitigate the need to hire new – scarce and expensive – technical staff. Garth claims admin staff can extend their management reach on average from 60 to 700 end-points per technician, with some managing well over 1,000.
He also claims that all the South African MSPs have recognized Kaseya in the last three years – the MSP Mentor 100 survey shows that all the top MSPs in the region use Kaseya as their RMM platform of choice. Kaseya is now addressing the corporate market in a more focused way and recently appointed two prominent IT VAR companies as partners. In the region, Kaseya is growing its market and creeping higher up the value chain, competing head on with the likes of Symantec’s Altiris and products such as LANDesk.
New Comms Open Up African Markets
Traditionally the IT infrastructure in South Africa was far ahead of that in countries such as Kenya and Uganda: however the laying of Submarine cables has greatly increased the bandwidth between Africa and the rest of the world. As a result Internet traffic growth on the East and West Africa is increasing substantially as more and more companies and individuals come on line. Most Africans access the Internet via 3G connections, which works pretty well and with the imminent installation and upgrades of the cellular infrastructure to 4G/LTE speeds look very good. Whilst in the past South Africa had the most Internet connections, today and as a result if the deployment of 3G to other African countries South Africa has slipped to 4th spot.
Garth believes that there is an installed base of over 500m mobile handsets in Africa with the proportion of smart devices on the rise as else where in the world. We have a smaller number and show shipments for the last year in Figure 1.
Solar power is also playing a large role in both the provisioning of cell towers and the ability to recharge smart devices using reasonably priced and readily available solar charging devices. Clearly having an abundance of sunshine is a regional advantage. Africa has over 1000 languages, but from a commercial standpoint English, French and Portuguese are the most spoken – as a result content is readily available and inexpensive in real terms. Kaseya’s software is available in 9 languages, including all the above.
Training Technical Staff
Kaseya is involved in training and assisting in the certification of their partner’s technical staff. The certification program was created and is maintained and managed by Professor Masoud Sadjadi (University of Florida) and his team.
It’s a five-day course with an exam on the Friday, although the 90% score required to attain the certification is hard to meet, those attending find it very valuable. Garth says they have trained around 70 people so far and are pushing to increase that number 150 by year-end.
Kaseya Via The Cloud Helps Overcome The Dearth Of Expertise
Garth notes a massive growth in purchasing Kaseya’s software as a service (Cloud) version. This has attracted those companies who want the features that Kaseya offers them but don’t necessarily want to provide the back office skills, hardware and hosting services to run it. They can consume the product on a month-by-month basis and there are various flavors to choose, from a free version, right through to a perpetual pricing model: in this Kaseya has addressed as many configurations for its partners as possible.
Barriers To African Business
The Arab spring last year taught many that freedom of information is a human right, but there is still a long way to go in some countries. Governments, legislation and tax laws are barriers and there is a need to open up economies. Garth believes Thabo Mbeki’s initiatives, which aim to create standards of governance, agreements and freedom in transitioning to the African Union are central to economic developments that will actually benefit Africa and Africans.
Some Conclusions – The Opportunity From Mobile Devices, Managed By MSPs
Garth introduced a number of new areas for consideration when assessing the African opportunities for IT suppliers, such as:
- The Vital contribution of the communications infrastructure (currently vastly improved for coastal countries)
- The need to develop IT skills and beyond
- The strong growth in smart phones and tablets
- The community approach to managed services provision
- The potential ‘leap frogging’ of traditional IT by entire mobile systems in emerging countries
Kaseya is a small company providing productivity tools to help overcome the scarcity and expense of technical staff, mainly among service providers-its strategy is the same in Africa and elsewhere, although the opportunities potentially far greater.