Kaseya outlines plans to double EMEA business

Kaseya’s recently appointed EMEA chief has confirmed the company plans to double the size of its business in the region within the next 12-18 months.

The MSP software’s president and general manager for EMEA, Ronan Kirby, told Microscope the growth strategy includes a “very aggressive hiring plan for next year”.

“Part of bringing me in was a broader investment plan into the region and really doubling down,” said Kirby, who joined the company last month, and will be based at Kaseya’s EMEA HQ in Dublin.

“I don’t want to say that that’s easy, but it’s extremely doable. We have the resources to do it, we’ve got the partners to do it and we’ve got the momentum in the market to do it," he added.

At this stage Kirby says he is still deciding where to invest. “We have a number of hubs around EMEA already…I’m in the process of just listening to all of the teams and trying to understand where the paths of least resistance our first place the next round of investment.”

In a statement Kaseya described Europe as “one of the company’s fastest-growing markets” but did not disclose any financial details, or the exact level of its investment in the region.

But Kirby said this was the first time that Kaseya has taken “a horizontal view of all of the different businesses from an EMEA perspective” following a two-year period of acquisition, which included snapping up Unitrends, Spanning Cloud Apps, RapidFire Tools, IT Glue, and its latest purchase in May 2019, threat intelligence and identity monitoring firm, ID Agent.

“One of the things I want to do is to start carving out our first ever horizontal geography and get the numbers into a shape that we can call it a region,” he said.

Kirby added that he was charged with being “a really loud voice for EMEA at the executive table, strongly on behalf of the needs of the market, our MSP customers and our staff.

“Why is the market opportunity in Germany a little different from the market opportunity in Santa Cruz? How do we better resonate with those audiences, how do we better position ourselves for the MSP in those markets? Up until now, nobody’s been doing that across the entire business.”

Elsewhere, Kirby was dismissive of rivals in the region, claiming Kaseya’s expanding IT Compete management platform differentiates the vendor in the competitive MSP software provider market. However, the company does go head-to-head with the likes of Datto and ConnectWise, at least on point solutions.

The firm also isn’t ruling out more M&A activity, claiming there are “certainly more acquisitions in our future” – specifically looking at the security space, with a potential announcement “as early as Q1 [2020].”