Kaseya and Datto GM of PSA discusses MSP trends in Australia

Pricing, retention of talent and running a business are the burning questions MSPs have for Kevin Sequeira.

MSPs are concerned about pricing of products, retaining good talent and running their businesses according to Kevin Sequeira, general manager of PSA & IT documentation at Datto & Kaseya.

Speaking to CRN Australia, Sequeira has been in the country speaking to various MSPs to understand what their pain points are. He said several themes had emerged from these conversations.

The first pain point was around the pricing of Kaseya’s products, such as Kaseya 365 endpoint.

"When they talk to us, they're very price sensitive. That's the big thing that I took away. When we price things, usually we start off in US pricing and then we try to do a conversion, but we try and adjust to the Australian market,” he said.

Sequeira explained the news of bundling seven products in Kaseya 365 Ops making it nearly 70 percent cheaper was received well by partners.

“We price about US$119 when we launched it. If you look at just our PSA system, it's priced at US$120, you're getting seven more products for the price of one. Pricing came up all the time.”

Another issue was hiring and retention of good talent. Sequeira said it is an issue that MSPs are constantly bringing up to him and his team.

“When I was doing a keynote, and one of the questions we had was, ‘are you concerned about hiring or retaining?’ Almost everybody in the room raised their hands on that front.”

He explained how competitors are making it harder for MSPs to retain staff.

“Competitors coming in and giving 20 percent more, especially MSPs, are very small margins. They're probably at 10 to 15 percent from a margin perspective.

“We're trying to change that to get them to closer to 30 percent by reducing our pricing to them, and also by helping them be more productive in terms of all these integrated systems.”

Compensation is a big part of why people who leave jobs, Sequeira said.

“But if they also feel they're doing meaningless, tedious work over and over again, that's another reason they're bored and they want to go in and try new things,” he explained.

Sequeira noted that partners want to have more events and opportunity to network, to understand how to better run their businesses and where vendors see the market going.

"A lot of times, MSPs are people that are very passionate about technology. They like to go fix things and they probably started off building computers in their garage,” he said.

"Some of the questions I got was, ‘how should we price this? How do you think our competitors are pricing?’ A lot of them were very surprised at how low they price their offering, they could price them probably at 60 to 70 percent more, and their customers would still pay for it.”

Sequeria noticed that the emerging to mid-market MSPs were confused on how to price their offerings.

“That's where things like TruPeers allows them to benchmark themselves and come in and say, ‘here's how you grow your business, here are the KPIs that you need to tackle’,” he explained.

"We had 35-40 meetings from all the way from enterprise customers to people who are just starting off and wanting to learn in that smaller segment.”

Sequeira said he appreciates how forthright Kaseya and Datto’s partners are.

“Partners are not shy about giving me feedback, they're very direct. I love that, I found probably Melbourne to be more direct than in Sydney,” he explained.

“They come in, they're very direct. They like to work hard and they like to party hard.”