Kaseya has hired Jim Lippie, an MSP veteran who had been closely associated with the MSPmentor 501 survey since 2016. Lippie joins Kaseya as GM of cloud computing, Kaseya confirmed to ChannelE2E. He's set to speak at next week's Kaseya Connect 2017 conference in Las Vegas, according to the agenda.
Lippie is a seasoned MSP veteran who previously led Thrive Networks, which M/C partners now owns. He also has extensive experience on the big data and analytics front. More recently he built Clarity Channel Advisors -- which has a data gathering engine that has hosted the MSPmentor 501 survey.
Lippie's move to Kaseya comes amid the current MSPmentor 501 readership survey, which solicits business and financial information from MSPs worldwide. The MSPmentor 501 survey started as a top 100 survey in fall 2007 and results debuted with the site's official launch in 2008. It has since grown to rank 501 MSPs worldwide.
ChannelE2E's co-owners -- Amy Katz and me -- are the former co-owners of MSPmentor. We launched the site in 2008, sold it in 2011 and exited in 2014. During our time with that brand, we ran the MSPmentor 501 survey in-house. MSPmentor outsourced the survey to Lippie's company -- Clarity Channel Advisors -- after our departure.
More recently, Lippie sold the peer group portion of Clarity Channel Advisors to Playground Partners in February 2017. Lippie was still involved in the MSPmentor 501 survey data gathering for 2017 as of a March 6 webcast with MSPmentor. And Clarity Channel Advisors was still involved as of a May 2 blog. The 2017 survey was originally scheduled to close on May 1, but the deadline has been extended to May 15, according to MSPmentor. Results are due in June 2017.
ChannelE2E has reached out to MSPmentor and Lippie to determine who is overseeing the MSPmentor 501 data gathering, where the data resides, and how survey data will be managed going forward.
Updated Wed, May 3, 3:20 p.m. ET: Lippie offered this response in terms of his transition and the ongoing survey:
"As you know based on your February 27th coverage, I recently sold Clarity Channel Advisory Group (CCAG) to the combination of Chris Merrill, Will Ominsky and John Barrows. In addition, Clarity Intelligence Partners (CIP) has played a role in gathering the data for the 501 survey. So going forward the combination of CCAG and CIP will work with MSPmentor without my involvement. MSPmentor has full access of the 501 database and can monitor all activity on their own to ensure the continued integrity of the 501 survey."
PS: I've got plenty of potential conflicts of interest with this story considering my former relationship with MSPmentor and our own research & content efforts here at ChannelE2E.
