MIAMI - Kaseya has acquired SaaS Alerts and is adding a user security option to its Kaseya 365 offering at a promotional price of $2.79 per user per month. The addition will expand the company’s detect and response capabilities, extending those to user behavior in the cloud.
Kaseya’s capability expansion and acquisition put an emphasis on what has become a key strategic directive and opportunity for MSPs in today’s market – protecting and defending small and mid-sized businesses from cybersecurity threats.
Before announcing the SaaS Alerts deal in his keynote address at Kaseya DattoCon, CEO Fred Voccola told the story of the growing cybersecurity threat to small and midsized businesses. For instance, he said, SMBs are the number one target of cybercriminals, and ransomware attacks against SMBs have increased by 350% since 2020. Yet nearly 50% of SMBs aren’t properly protected due to cost concerns.
“Security is super important,” CEO Fred Voccola told the 3,500 MSPs here this week.
Kaseya Fills out Cybersecurity Portfolio
While Kaseya has previously offered endpoint detection and response (EDR) and managed detection and response (MDR), among other offerings, the SaaS Alerts acquisition fills a gap that targets cloud-based user security in apps.
“Cloud detection and response is the fastest growing and most important part of the user base,” Voccola said. “This business is one of the fastest growing businesses in the MSP sector.”
Kaseya said that the extension provides a way for MSPs to react to SaaS threats before they impact users. The AI-based platform detects patterns and anomalies in user and application behavior, and then it auto-remediates with rule-based account locking.
Kaseya 365 User is offered at a promotional price of $2.79 per user per month. Kaseya hasn’t indicated when the promotional pricing will end. But once it does, pricing will go up to $3.75 per user per month.
Kaseya 365 User includes all the functionality in SaaS Alerts plus Graphus cloud-based email security, which protects against phishing attacks, and Bullfish, the company’s security awareness training platform. It also includes SaaS backup and Dark Web ID.
At Kaseya Connect in May in Las Vegas, Voccola announced Kaseya 365 Endpoint. This bundle of core functions for MSPs was offered at a promotional price of $3.75 per user per month and $1.75 for the express version, which did not include MDR. The bundle included RMM, antivirus, EDR, MDR, patch management, ransomware rollback, and endpoint backup. Voccola showed this promotional pricing again during his keynote, but it wasn’t immediately clear if the company was rolling prices back to match the promo rates again.
Voccola said that since the announcement in May, more than 5,000 MSPs have adopted Kaseya 365, protecting five million endpoints.
SaaS Alerts CEO Joins Kaseya. Again.
Lippie will remain as CEO of SaaS Alerts, now under Kaseya. On stage, announcing the acquisition, Voccola said that Lippie is one of his best friends. Lippie served as a general manager and senior vice president at Kaseya from 2017 until 2021, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Kaseya’s private equity owner Insight Partners also held a majority stake in SaaS Alerts.
SaaS Alerts was founded in 2020 with co-founder Charles Buck working on the technology piece and Jim Lippie working on the sales and leading the company as CEO. The company’s SaaS protection of apps is based on APIs that provide log data, and Lippie has been fighting to get more companies to enable their APIs with log data to improve their monitoring and security. In recent years, SaaS Alerts has created a petition, “I want my SaaS Alerts,” that demands SaaS vendors provide APIs that provide log data for security monitoring. For instance, Intuit’s APIs do not incorporate this log data. Yet Intuit is a huge vendor in the SMB market, and it handles sensitive financial data. Lippie said he hopes to continue the pressure on Intuit and others after the acquisition.
