Episode 73: Naked Farm to Table

Read the Transcript

Erick and Rich discuss the long-term implications for MSPs of new research on agentic AI from Microsoft and N-able, as well as how and why MSPs should get back to often forgotten sales basics. Then they’re joined live from the Kaseya Connect conference in Las Vegas by Mike Puglia, GM of Kaseya’s security suite, for a conversation about why MSPs need fully managed SIEM solutions. And finally, one last thing: An annual gardening ritual from Rich’s hometown of Seattle that could be dangerous to people with thorns or slugs in their yard.

Discussed in this episode:

2025: The Year the Frontier Firm Is Born

N‑able Report Reveals the Future of the SOC Relies on AI, While Human Intervention Remains Essential

Kaseya announces latest innovations at Connect 2025

Seattle goes full bloom on naked gardening day

 

Transcript:

 

Rich: [00:00:00] And 3, 2, 1. Bo off. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the MSP Chat podcast. Your weekly visit with two talking heads, talking with you. But the services, strategies and success tips you need to make it big in managed services. My name is Rich Freeman. I’m Chief analyst at Channel Mastered, the organization responsible for the show.

I am joined as I am every week by our other co-host, our chief strategist at Channel mastered Erick

Erick: Simpson. Erick, how you doing? I’m doing well, rich. I’m getting ready to wrap up this very busy week and then head off to meet you. For a super heavy, busy week next week. So I can’t wait for us to to meet each [00:01:00] other in person and do what we do together that we do so often via virtual meetings.

What do you think?

Rich: I am looking forward to seeing you in the Fletcher. I always do. And yeah we’ve got a huge week. We are doing all sorts of exciting stuff next week. First of all we’re recording this episode for you. You’re, you are listening to or watching it. After the Kase Connect event, but we are recording it just a little bit before that event.

At that show, Erick and I will be presenting or co-presenting a few different sessions. We are gonna be recording an interview with the general manager of the security suite. At Kaseya, Mike Pia, you’re gonna hear that later in this episode of the show. We are going to record one of those sessions I referred to that we are doing together at the Kaseya Connect event, or specifically the IT glue, glue experience.

Pre-day event. That is actually going to be a panel discussion about on growth tips for MSPs. We are gonna be recording that live as it happens. That will be part of [00:02:00] next week’s show, the next episode of the show. So we’re gonna have that for you coming up in a week’s time. And Erick and I are super excited about that.

And then after that, whirlwind two days. We get on a plane Tuesday evening, next week we fly to San Francisco. For the RSA conference, giant security conference. And later on, Erick, we won’t do it now, but you and I have to set an over under bet. We’re gonna be in Las Vegas. We’ve gotta set an over under bet on how many steps we get in at RSA.

Is it, 50,000? Is that maybe where we set the bar? It’ll be interesting to see.

Erick: You’re scaring me rich. You really are. All right. So I don’t wanna think about that anymore. I’m just gonna bulk up, make sure I got plenty of carb load for the very, very busy frenetic week next week.

Rich: This is what happens when you partner in business with a guy whose blog is called Channel Holic.

You go all in, Erick. And we are gonna it’s gonna be it’s gonna be a lot, but it’s going to be fun. And we’ll share it all with you folks in our audience. When that is done [00:03:00] until then, let’s dive into our story of the week. And it involves data that I pulled from two different studies that came out this week that.

Kind of perfectly dovetail and underscore an important issue that we’ve touched on from time to time on the show here, which is the increasing role, increasingly important and strategic and impactful role that AI is playing in the business of delivering managed services. So some of this data to, to begin with comes from Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, which was just published as we record this.

They collected data. This is a lot of this is telemetry. From Microsoft 365 deployments. So trillions of productivity signals, as Microsoft says, 31,000 people, 31 countries, a lot of data they sifted through. And and they did some polling here as well. And they, nearly half, 46% of the business leaders they polled says their companies are using, not ai mind you, but AI agents to automate workflows or [00:04:00] processes.

Today, this is across industries. That is changing the nature of of roles of needed skills inside of organizations. So as the use of agents increases. 28% of business managers today are considering hiring AI workforce managers to lead hybrid teams of people and agents. 32% plan to hire AI agents, specialists to design, develop, and optimize them within the next 12 to 18 months.

So you’re looking at like just under a. Third of businesses are already starting to hire people whose job basically is to run AI agents. Now again, this is across industries. Microsoft called out a subset of the 31 thousand person. Sample that they looked at, and they identified these people as working for what they called frontier firms.

These are companies that are on the leading edge of ai agent adoption. And these are relatively rare companies. Right now, there are only 844 [00:05:00] people. Out of 31,000 sampled who are at these frontier firms. But the frontier firms are where everybody in and outside of managed services is headed right now and why this matters and why everyone is headed that direction becomes apparent in this study.

71% of the people who work for frontier firms say their company is thriving. As opposed to 37% of businesses generally, so that healthiest businesses, at least from the perspective from inside, is that the healthiest businesses, the ones that are growing fastest are the ones that are out in front on Agent ai.

Right now now as I say, Microsoft’s just looking all across the waterfront, every different industry, et cetera. But there was also a study a state of the SOC study from Enable that came out this week. That has some interesting data in it indicating what AI and agentic AI can do specifically in the realm of it.

And a couple of different findings from that [00:06:00] study. The study shows that AI can automate 70% of all. Incident investigation and threat remediation activity. And this is based on enable’s own experience, right? So they acquired Ad Lumen last year. The these are the folks who are providing enables NDR service.

They’re operating state of the art soc, what they’re seeing inside those four walls, this then AI can already automate, fully, automate 70% of incident investigation and threat remediation. And the ad lumen SOC team has amplified its threat hunt hunting capabilities using AI by 153 x. Just to give you an idea of the productivity boost that we’re looking at here.

Meanwhile, 78% of lead is back to the Microsoft study. 78% of leaders at businesses of all kinds are considering hiring for AI specific roles to prepare for the future. 95% within the frontier firms. And yet I will tell you, Erick, I as [00:07:00] we record this, I am at the Robin Robbins TMT bootcamp event in Dallas.

I’ve been talking to MSPs, a lot of awareness and interest in AI and automating with ai. I’m talking to some people who are already doing some pretty interesting and exciting things. I’m not talking to a lot of frontier firms, I would say. At this conference right now. And the enable numbers there, those results give you a sense for what you as an MSP can potentially accomplish using ai.

And I think folks in the audience here need to be thinking even that much harder about their adoption of AI internally, their AI strategy, their strategy for leveraging that this technology in a way that is safe for the business and the customers, but that. Protects them, allows them to grow the business, increase their productivity by these massive amounts the way Enable has and protects them, basically from falling behind the MSP frontier firms that will be doing this over [00:08:00] the course of the next 12 to 24 months.

Erick: Wow. Rich, there’s so much to unpack there in both of those studies. I guess from my perspective. The question that I would love an answer to is how many MSPs are putting a strategy together to leverage ai, not only for a point product or a point service or an activity or something like that, but just a top to bottom review of the organization as a whole.

I’m just imagining what a, an AI consultant would be doing for businesses coming in and saying, we’re going to assess your entire organization from top to bottom, every business unit, and we’re going to identify maybe the start three or four, four low hanging fruit opportunities where we can leverage AI in each of these [00:09:00] business units or these workflows.

In order to raise the visibility of the data, the performance itself to a level, and then when come back around and do it to the next level. I’m just curious how many MSPs are really whiteboarding what’s coming down the pike? Because my sense is if we’re not doing that now. Then these frontier organizations that are MSPs are going to have such a first mover advantage that it’s going to be difficult for other MSPs to catch up.

I think there’s just so much value that AI can bring in, in, in the overall business, rather than just maybe at, on the service desk or, for some sales admin stuff and things like that. I’d. I hear your thoughts, rich.

Rich: Yeah, and obviously I can’t quantify an answer to that, but I spoke to somebody at the conference here who [00:10:00] says that he has a, I think the term used was an automation engineer on the staff.

Now that is more in the realm of RPA than ai, but he has someone whose job basically is to think about automation and productivity through automation. I spoke to somebody else. Who has what he called an AI champion on the team. Not necessarily a full-time job for this person, but there, there is somebody who’s gone deeper into the capabilities of the AI technologies this particular company is using right now, and is thinking about where do we go next beyond what we’re doing now with an eye towards the idea that as soon as it feels, safe and practical that they will.

Start doing things with AI on a fully autonomous automated basis. They’re getting there now. They already have this particular company already has basically ai manning the help desk overnight. When the employees of this company are asleep, if you call in, AI’s gonna answer, you’re gonna get a human voice.

It’s gonna [00:11:00] do some basic triage work if it knows. Figures out the easy thing that needs to be done, password reset, it’ll do it. If not, it’ll say, please hold and it’ll text a live human tech and somebody will get on, whoever’s on call will get on to deal with the issue, but they’ve already got somebody who’s.

Whose job basically is to take the company as far as it can go down that road today and keep them moving so that they’re leveraging the power of these technologies as, as quickly as they feel it’s safe to do wow.

Erick: Ai, the future is now, right? We’re seeing it right before eyes, and I think.

It’s generally accepted that the first thing that an organization should do when it’s getting ready to pioneer or r and d something, is to appoint a champion, someone whose responsibility it, it is to at least collate all of the data, gather it, and then lead the charge. If everybody’s responsible, nobody’s responsible.

Rich. [00:12:00] So I, so good on that MSP and I think we could all. No matter what we’re doing as an MSP or as an SMB business owner these are good kind of first steps to take when considering how to evaluate the, the benefit and the risk, and then how to move forward in, in a in a thoughtful way to explore.

How to leverage ai to the benefit of the organization and, the clients they serve

Rich: Erick, we are talking about moving beyond the basics of service delivery here and that is a pretty good lead into your tip of the week. ’cause it’s about getting beyond a different kind of basics.

Erick: You bet Rich.

And today we’re talking about getting back to sales basics and, it’s been a while since I think I’ve talked about sales on the program, but just recently I’ve begun working with a few new MSP partners and what I’ve [00:13:00] noticed is, to the benefit and maybe sometimes to the challenge of the intention of PSA solutions, trying to be everything for everyone.

Optimizing the quoting module and the proposal module, integrating it with QuickBooks or your accounting program, and all that seemed to be no-brainers. Wow, this makes it easy. I have my my, my pricing of my services. I’ve got my agreements. It makes it easy for me to put together these quotes.

Into a template and then deliver it to my prospects and or clients and try to get them to say yes. And rich in today’s more hybrid kind of a business environment and a sales environment, what I am a little bit concerned about is we’re getting away, I think [00:14:00] from. Sales basics from a consultative perspective.

So what I mean by that is these platforms, if we’re not careful, make it so easy for us to generate quotes of things like that, that it removes some of that consultative approach and of classic service selling. The methodologies that I like to. Teach sales teams to do on things like that.

And I’m seeing a lot of partners that are just using the quoting templates as rote from the platform, and it really does not reflect, I think, the value of the relationship and the service that the MSP wants to promote to their clients. So I just wanted to. I’m gonna zoom out a little bit and speak to the folks that are leveraging not only the PSA solutions, but the other [00:15:00] CRM platforms and speak directly from a consultative perspective.

I like the ability to have a very meaningful qualifying conversation with a client, and I’m not saying this isn’t being done right. I think that MSPs and sales professionals in general, rich, really understand how to have that. Alternative solution, a conversation with clients trying to really uncover not only their immediate pain and needs, but also the latent needs that they might not be thinking about.

And then build that into kind of their presentation. And by presentation I don’t mean sending over, a quote that basically, has a few paragraphs and then a. A list of services and gear and gets the client to, electronically sign it, right? What I mean by a presentation is that, that component that says, I’ve heard you, Mr.

Or Mrs. Client and I’ve put [00:16:00] together how I like to teach teams to sell Rich, a short slide deck to make sure that I understood everything, that that I understood everything. Here are the things that you shared with me. Here are your pains and challenges. Here are your alternatives, and there’s always three alternatives that every buyer, no matter who it is, rich, or what their buying considers before making a buying decision, especially one that is so meaningful to their organization.

The first thing that a buyer thinks about before saying yes to something or ultimately saying no is number one. What if I did nothing right? What if I did nothing? What’s the worst thing that can happen? Obviously that could be the costliest option, especially when we’re talking about. Today’s day and age of cybersecurity and things like that.

The second option that they think is, yeah, what if I, could I fix it myself? Obviously if a buyer could fix something themselves, if they had the expertise and the time and the energy and the effort and the money to do it, they would’ve done it already. So [00:17:00] that’s an easy one to overcome.

And then the third one the third option that a buyer thinks about Rich is well. Why not go with one of your competitors? Why go with you? And that ultimately, based on a couple of factors, could also be the wrong decision. The solution is always to go with us, and then it allows the sales professional to conduct this conversation, a couple of slides that say, here’s your pains that we understood.

Here are your alternatives that you’re thinking about, and let me tell you why none of these work for you based upon what you’ve shared with me. The solution is to go with us, and this is the only, the first time Rich where we get to talk about ourselves. In this conversation, the sales conversation should be all focused on the prospect or the client, and then to say, this is why we’re the solution and these are our values and benefits.

And then based upon our prior conversations and your pains and challenges and the budget range that you share with me, we’ve put together [00:18:00] this. Package for you and typically rich, that’s gonna be our good, better, or best package. We’ve just winnowed it down to what makes sense for them within their budget range, and then overcome any objections.

And then the client says, yep, I’m ready to move forward. That’s when we send over the final agreement, right? So I think we’re missing that consultative component sometimes when we’re doing sales or maybe we used to do it and we’re taking shortcuts now and we’re trying to get clients to just sign an agreement electronically.

I’m sensing that with a few partners I’m working with now, and I hope that isn’t representative of the majority of MSPs out there, because what we do is so sticky, so valuable, so important to a client’s business that we wanna make sure that we are reflecting that value during that sales presentation so that when they sign that agreement.

We’ve done our job of making sure that they that we have positioned ourselves away from any of the other [00:19:00] competitors out there and they are making the right decision and.

Rich: Yeah, what I mean, what you’re talking about is a potential very serious misuse of automation. To go back a little bit to what I was talking about before, one of the sessions that we are leading at to say connect and we, it’s past tense by the time this show is out there, but it is a panel discussion involving MSPs who are using AI in their business right now.

And two of them it just so happens are using AI today. To automate the production of RFPs, which is great. That’s a great use of ai ’cause that’s rote work and you really shouldn’t be pouring hours of human effort in that. But if you come away from that thinking, great, I, I AI is, I.

It’s spitting out RFPs for me in a few seconds, and I’m just gonna send that off to the customer and move on. That’s a bad use of ai. What you wanna do, and this goes to applying AI and the business more generally, is you automate the stuff that you really shouldn’t be spending your [00:20:00] time on.

That opens up time, more time for the stuff that you should be spending your time on, which in this case is having those consultative sales conversations and, ongoing consultative conversations with existing clients as well. So it, with with automation, with these tools that you’re talking about, it’s not an either or thing.

The tool is helping you free up time that you can use in more valuable ways, but you gotta keep using the time on those valuable ways.

Erick: Absolutely. Rich, and the top sales professionals that are. Super successful and earning every dollar of comp and commission that they’re receiving.

You better believe that they’re selling consultatively and building relationships with clients and not just simply sending out, quotes and RFP responses out of a system, hoping someone, determines that, yeah, you are the best solution for me based on this, 12 page agreement you sent me and signing up.

Rich: Go to Amazon folks and see if you can find a bestselling [00:21:00] book from a a legendary sales professional about achieving big numbers in sales by just sending a bunch of emails. And we, there are any number of books that will teach you how to sell consultatively. But yeah, that, that is a key to success in sales in any industry.

Folks, Erick and I are gonna take a quick break here. When we come back on the other side, we’re gonna be joined as we told you we would be earlier on in the show by Mike Pia. He’s the GM of the security Suite at Kase. We are gonna be talking with him about all things security at Casea right now.

That’s obviously a very big concern over there. So we’ll see what their thinking is all about now and going forward. We’re gonna have that for you in just a few moments. Please stick around.

And welcome back to part two, this episode of the MSP Chat podcast, which as you can see, we are recording live from Kaseya Connect 2025 here in Las [00:22:00] Vegas. We are joined. By the general manager of Kaseya Security Suite, Mike Pia regular viewers and listeners of the program. Might remember that Mike joined us on the show about six months ago at DattoCon.

The reason he is now a regular on the show is because Kaseya regularly breaks security news at these major conferences. This one was no exception. We’re gonna get into that in a moment. But first for people who have not met you before, Mike, just tell ’em a little bit about,

Mike: What you do at Kase.

Great. I run the security suite, which is all of the security products, everything from product management, r and d to go to market. I’ve been here now, this is my 11th connect. Time flies when you’re having fun. And I have a background working for different security companies for longer than I wanna admit.

Rich: So the big security news. And then there was backup news. There are multiple security related announcements here at the show, but the biggest one was the launch of Kaseya Sim. So from a big picture standpoint, before we got into that product specifically, what [00:23:00] is the use case, the need for sim among MSPs?

Mike: Yeah. I think the big thing. That we’re starting to see, and we’ve seen it over time, things coming downstream from the enterprise to the small to mid-size enterprise and small to mid-size organizations and the MSPs that serve them. And so we’ve seen more and more of adoption of technologies that were once relegated to enterprise.

So years ago, if you had to do a pen test, now even if you’re a small company, you have to do a pen test. At least annually and we started to address that. It used to all be just av, now everybody is AV E-D-R-M-D-R. And now a lot of the compliance requirements and even cyber insurance, regardless of the size of the company, are requiring SIM for the ability to have all of the log data.

All being a relative term. And if you are headed for, if any of your customers are DOD [00:24:00] contractors, which there are, depending on whose estimate, 70,000 to a hundred thousand in this country they’re gonna have to have a sim. A lot of cyber insurance requires a sim, so some customers will have to dive a little bit deeper, and we wanted to make sure we had an offering that could do that for them.

Erick: Mike what does it take to deliver a SIM solution specifically crafted for MSPs? Yeah, I think the big difference

Mike: is there are many, great sim products and they were built for enterprises, whether it’s, Splunk or Alien Vault back in the day or others. But they come with that price tag, hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars depending on how much data you’re sending.

And it’s a bit. Much for a smaller organizations to be able to handle. So we look at what do they need to be able to record and deliver on, and that’s where we focus [00:25:00] instead of many moons ago, I worked at an enterprise and I swear if you moved your mouse too quickly, it got logged to the sim. That was great for them.

But it’s not realistic for a smaller business. We were able to go deeper because we were already doing a lot of this kind of technology. We had a product rocket Cyber, which we acquired in 2001. It is. Growth has been phenomenal. And it gets a lot of log data off of endpoints, firewalls, and various other applications.

In October, we announced the acquisition of SaaS alerts, which is getting a lot of the data off of everyone knows about Microsoft C3 65 and Google, but what about some of the other apps that you have, Salesforce, dropbox, et cetera. So getting all of that and marrying the two together in a solution that is easy for MSPs to manage that highlights the noise, not all the false positives, but allows those who [00:26:00] want to tinker to be able to search across everything.

And so bringing together a lot of that technology that we had in those two products to add on for those who need a sim to be able to go through it is something that we’re really excited about.

Rich: Yeah, so talk a little bit more about what is Kase sm what’s in there? And then talk a little bit about the pricing, because this morning at the general session, they announced introductory pricing, which was a little mind blowing, but I’m curious where it goes from there.

Mike: It was a little mind blowing to begin with. It was looking at how, if you have Kaseya 365 endpoint. User, you already have a lot of the collection data in the various components of those solutions. So if you have those two, we’re adding it on at a dollar per user because that’s user being all right.

It’s just a ballpark assumption of if you are monitoring in Microsoft 365, I’m making up a number a hundred users. Why do I have to [00:27:00] make it complicated? You probably have about a hundred computers. You probably have a handful of firewalls just charge by user to make it simple, and it’s really just an add-on price to what you’re already paying for those two other K 365 solutions to make it easy because one of the biggest things with SIM is pricing models.

If you’ve ever tried to buy it, you probably don’t know how much you’re gonna pay every month, right? Because how many events per second? How many gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes of data, how many attributes that aren’t in your control? Are usually just like cell phones. Used to be usually at the end of the month is a surprise.

We don’t want to have surprises, so we made it very simple and we’re gonna start. You are already getting most of the technology that we have for those who need a little extra to have the search and the deep, compliance requirements of all the data, we’ve added it a dollar per user. Will it go up from there?

Probably. But I don’t anticipate [00:28:00] some massive change. We’re gonna go with the first 500 MSPs as we announced here today. We’ll take a look at, in the real world what’s really there. We’ve worked at really lowering our costs significantly. ’cause we have a lot more power to do that with a lot of the data center providers and technology providers behind us.

So that’s where we’re headed with it.

Erick: So Mike, the term disruptive comes to mind when I think about pricing for sim, because like you said, it is, traditionally unpredictable because you’re just combing through how many events and how much data and all these things.

So from your perspective, what beyond. Just the immediate impact of this pricing model and this offering. What are the implications for MSPs and maybe more importantly, the

Mike: clients that they serve? I think it’s about giving them, another tool in their war chest to be able to use to help protect those organizations.

And if we can do it at a price point that, I don’t wanna say it doesn’t matter, but it’s close to, it [00:29:00] doesn’t matter that I can bring to bear these things without, as an MSP. Impacting my bottom line significantly, my profit margin, and as a end customer that may need this technology but not really know anything about it, they’re looking to the MSPs on, Hey, I’m a healthcare provider that needs all these things that I’m being required to do.

Yeah, we’ll take care of it. They don’t have to break the bank so they can have a better relationship with, we’re giving you more protection. We are not. Going to have to double your price that you pay us every month. And the MF MSP can do it profitably. As I said, what’s interesting about the cybersecurity market, and it’s just where we live today, is if you here at the show, if you go over to the exhibit hall about, I, I didn’t do a rough count, but probably 90% of those booths have something to do with cybersecurity, if you would back five years ago to connect.

It wasn’t like that. And that’s because. [00:30:00] Those are the biggest threats that those end companies face today, and they’re being either mandated by regulations, compliance requirements, or insurance to be able to do it. Those have simply come downstream.

Rich: O One of the things that was emphasized to me in interviews here at the show earlier on in the week is that Kaseya Sim is a fully managed solution.

So talk a little bit about what you are doing, what the MSP who subscribes to that system is doing, and why you folks felt a fully managed sim is the way to go for MSPs.

Mike: Yeah, that’s a great, it’s a great question because. We already have this model with our rocket cyber MDR, essentially. MSP is responsible for the normal things they do every day.

Deploy agents, connections APIs, all of that. But we’ll collect all the data. We will our soc will triage the data, which is really the heavy lifting. I [00:31:00] see X, Y, and Z, and in the emergency situations, they’re gonna take action. Something, someone’s connected from Russia and they’re doing X, Y, and Z.

It doesn’t do much good to send you an alert about it, right? So we’ll isolate the machine, pick up the phone and call you Threat hunt across the organization. Now, the reason we did this with sim, it’s really an extension of that more data being collected from cloud applications, from endpoints from other third parties, but.

Not having, you have to have a, a PhD in cybersecurity of how do I connect this firewall or how do I connect this third party application? And then having somebody with eyes on it that when alerts come up, they can either take action, they can call you, or for low priority, just pass it on to you, but be there.

So if you pick up the phone and call and say, I have a question that we can do that. It’s interesting. We looked back at rocket Cyber many years ago, probably 2019. 20, yeah. 2019. They introduced [00:32:00] it because it’s an MDR solution, so it collects all the data. It goes to our soc take action, picks up the phone and calls you.

They offered a, just here’s the data, right? No soc behind it. And what you actually saw was the adoption fell off dramatically because they’re not there 20, most MSPs don’t have somebody on staff 24 7. I don’t mind picking up the, having somebody on call like I already do in the middle of the night for emergencies and having to pay them if they take a, an emergency call.

But I don’t want to have a minimum of 10 people. To do seven by 24 by 365. That’s a big hit to a lot of MSPs to add that amount of people. So we decided this was the best way to do it. We can control what’s going on in the system, but. They said this during the cast. One of the things that is a double-edged sword about the technologies is we show everything we collect, so not just the alerts.

A lot of [00:33:00] organizations or vendors, they’ll show you the alerts a. But how did I get there? We have a lot of people that are technical in nature, so if it’s a black box, they don’t really like it. So you can see all the data we’re collecting because maybe in your organization we want to, and I have someone that, that does this.

I want to collect and. Report on every time someone prints in this organization. And I have, there’s some financial, reason for this. And if they would steal data by printing, that seems a little strange, but couldn’t they just email it or whatever. But that is one of their requirements. And.

They can see that with us, even though out of the box, we’re not gonna, be picking up the phone and calling you on it, but by giving you that option, it’s a double-edged sword. You could go in and see all the data and you can make some changes and work with us. I say double-edged sword because some people, see all the data and they get, oh my goodness, those aren’t the alarms.

So we try to walk right in the middle do it for you, but [00:34:00] have the ability to see everything that’s happening behind the scenes.

Erick: Wow. That’s a lot of data collection.

Mike: It is. I would say the other part about lowering prices is with some of the technologies today, when you have that data the compression ratio of where you store it is absolutely insane these days.

Not much like 10 years ago where a majority of the cost for. A sim like technology or any type of storage technology was. The cost of the storage. Now most of it is the amount of compute as you are sending those events in and out.

Erick: Yeah. I was sitting in the keynote this morning and was amazed to find the statistics of how much you were able to reduce.

In order to deliver this service. Having these additions and these modifications offering sim to MSPs. From your perspective, Mike, what other security services. [00:35:00] Outside of maybe products, should MSPs be thinking about delivering to their clients now? One of

Mike: the big ones is I would say there’s a couple of steps you can take, right?

There’s outside of products and pen testing is relatively new as a service, but having a quarterly business review that’s focused on cybersecurity. Is something that’s really important. And sometimes we skip quarterly business reviews or there I opened five tickets and closed this and did this for you.

But having an ongoing security conversation with, and we’re doing a lot of this with our powered services group and others of, Hey, over the last three months, do you know what’s happened and beyond vulnerabilities? Like the government passed a new law that’s probably gonna be act enacted next quarter about.

This type of requirement there’s a ton going on. So making you the expert on what’s coming up and what you’re doing to protect them and where you think they need to go. So building [00:36:00] them a roadmap. The other thing that I’ve seen universally is. V CSO services. So every, a lot of people are well versed in VCIO.

I’ve seen it really crank up in Europe first, which is rather interesting. A lot of European MSPs have virtual CISOs because in a lot of cases, a lot of those small businesses you now must legally do based on different requirements, have a privacy or a CISO officer on board, and you’re not gonna hire somebody if you’re a.

A tiny company, so being able to have somebody in your organization that has done the homework and can offer a virtual CISO service, and they can help guide what are the right things for this organization.

Rich: You’ve got a company in the expo hall here named Sino. And basically what they do is help MSPs credibly provide a vcso service for that very reason.

Yep. One [00:37:00] last question. ’cause you were talking, with sim it as with a lot of security technology starts in the enterprise, works its way into the managed services world. This is not a roadmap question per se, but are there. Technology is in use in the enterprise right now, that you have a sense are gonna make their way into this market too.

Mike: I think it’s really interesting and that’s a great, you used to be able to see what’s going on in the enterprise, what are they buying and delay it three to five years, start building it simpler, easier, cost effect. That’s changed with AI because you do have some more things going on around.

Web scanning and things like that, that are just, cable stakes in the enterprise, but aren’t done at all at the small business. But I think AI has changed the game in terms of what’s coming downstream. It’s not three to five years things. They’re messing around with ai they’re messing around with out in that hall right now.

I guarantee, I’ve learned a lot [00:38:00] more from MSPs who are very tactically. They’re like, write me a PowerShell script that goes to a machine and the, guy’s showing me how he does it now. And he’s here you go. And then I’m gonna tweak it. ’cause there’s some little, errors or what have you.

He goes, but that used to take me 45 minutes, now it takes me five. And that’s a tactical use case. So in the enterprise, AI is the wild west. You’ve got, privacy and CISOs trying to figure out what are our policies. Almost shadow it, but on steroids you’ve got employees just using it, right?

And trying to figure out what they’re gonna do with it. I think it’s clear that technology is going to be downstream, certainly for MSPs doing their job. And we saw a lot of that today. How can it help with tickets? How can it help respond to security incidents and prompt you or get you the information?

For years. Forever, information [00:39:00] was reports or a dashboard, right? And it’s, and you set up the columns, machine is a windows and user is this, and now it’s, show me everything that. Mike did in the last 48 hours and have it go and pull all the stuff for you. So I think it’s gonna happen At the same time, what we’ve been trying to do is we call it practical ai.

If you can go to chat GPT and. Cut and paste, what’s the point of doing it for you? Where we can use some of the data and some of the things that are unique to get the answer to you right as you are happening. So I think you’re gonna see that happen at the SMB level and the M and the enterprise level at pretty much the same time.

Rich: Mike, we really appreciate you making some time for us in the middle of a very busy show, busy week for you. Oh, it’s always fun. Thank you guys for coming. For folks in the audience who wanna learn more about Kaseya Sim or maybe just get in touch with you, where should they go?

Mike: Kaseya on off [00:40:00] of our homepage.

The sim is now there. If you’re already using our K 365 solutions, we’re gonna sign up the first 500 and run that probably over the summer here. And for our guests in the Southern AM Sphe during the winter and then go wide with it. So it’s right on the website. You can fill that out.

Rich: Fantastic, Mike. Thanks again for joining us very much. Oh, thank you very much for having me folks. Erick and I are going to take a quick break now when we come back on the other side, we’re gonna share a few final thoughts about this conversation with Mike Pia from Kaseya. Have a little fun wrap up the show.

Stick around. I. We’re gonna be right back

and welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast. We are still live at Kaseya Connect 2025. We were just joined by Mike Pulley, a very interesting conversation in a lot of ways. I’ll tell you just in terms of the news hound in me, the journalist when we were at the general session this morning, [00:41:00] and they positioned the dollar per user per month pricing as an introductory rate, I thought okay, for that first 500 users as a reward for being an early adopter, we’re gonna give them this incredible kind of price.

And the number might go up. But it doesn’t sound like it’s gonna go up dramatically, basically. And this was enlightening for me. They’re gonna use those first 500 earlier adopters to get a sense for how much soc capacity, how much capacity in general MSPs consume in bulk. They’re gonna compare that to the estimates that got them to a dollar per user per month.

So if it turns out that it needs to be, a dollar 50 or a dollar 25 or a dollar seven, they will learn that. Within a matter of months and adjust the pricing. But it doesn’t sound like this is some teaser rate that becomes $25, per user, per month in Q3 or Q4.

Erick: Yeah, they presented it almost as a, this is our thank you to you MSPs.

So we’re trying to keep the cost low [00:42:00] and I can, as I think about it more what they’re doing and how you just described it, rich is a very measured approach to make sure that. They’re doing it thoughtfully and carefully and working out the kinks and the bugs so that they can then scale it more broadly.

Rich: It’s like you said, it’s another disruptive story from Kaseya so that, the even bigger news at the show is the introduction of another Kaseya 365 skew, Kaseya 365 Ops PSA documentation connect booster for payments. Stuff that according to Kaseya typically goes adds up.

To $400 per user per month. They were selling that at 129 per user, per month,

Erick: per technician, per month. Was it per technician? Yeah, I think it was 1 29 per MSP technician per month is what I understood.

Rich: Okay. Which would make a lot more sense actually. Yeah. Yeah. Still a pretty

Erick: disruptive, very disruptive to have that capability and to have the ability.

To basically, the [00:43:00] AI across all of these platforms. And then to create this operational dashboard that provides visibility and ease of, ticket closure and efficiency and reporting. The demo was, the short demo that they presented during the keynote was quite impressive.

Rich: Folks, we have got time at this point in the show for just one last thing and so we’re at Kaseya Connect.

It is actually April 30th. As we’re recording the show, Erick and I are going straight from here to the RSA conference in San Francisco to really dive deep into security. And then I at least go home on Friday, May 2nd, which is good. That is just in time to be in Seattle on. Saturday May 3rd which is World Naked Gardening Day.

And little did we know Erick World Naked Gardening Day was born in my hometown of Seattle, Washington. The birthplace of Naked Gardening Day in 2005. Mark’s story a Seattle based natures decided gardening is [00:44:00] fun. It’s even more fun without pants. What? We started out as a Seattle phenomenon took the world by storm, and now apparently people do it all over the place.

I’ve got a few safety tips though on on naked gardening. Watch out for slugs. They’re slow, they’re sneaky. They find their way into places you didn’t know existed and. Probably don’t want them. Use eco-friendly products, of course. You’ve got pesticides and delicate bits.

We don’t want those to mix. And no power tools again,

Erick: could be dangerous. Good tips, rich. I imagine there might be a market for make it farm to table, vegetables and such. As long as folks are careful about how they harvest

Rich: Las Vegas, Nevada is the birthplace of World Naked Farm to table.

You, you witnessed it. Folks and we thank you for that. We thank you for witnessing that and for joining us on this episode of the show. We’re gonna be back in a week’s time with another episode for you. Until then, I will just remind you that this is both a video and an audio podcast, which [00:45:00] means that if you are listening to us right now.

But you like to watch podcasts too. You can find us on YouTube if you are watching us on YouTube, but you’re into audio podcasts. Go to Spotify, Google, apple, you name it. Wherever you get your podcasts, you’re gonna find us there too. And wherever you find us, please subscribe, rate, review. It’s gonna help other people find and enjoy the show.

Just like you do. This show is produced by the great RUS Johns. It is edited by the great Riley Simpson, and they’re both part of the team with us here at Channel Mastered. They can and will create a podcast for you if you’d like them to. Podcasts though are just a tiny little bit. Of what we do for our clients at Channel Mastered.

If you want the big picture, go to www.channel Mastered.com. Channel Mastered has a sister organization called MSP Mastered. That is Erick working one-to-one with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business. And you can learn more about MSP Mastereded at www dot. MSP Mastered.com. So once again, we thank you for joining us.

We’re gonna see you in a [00:46:00] week. Until then, folks, please remember, as always, you can’t spell channel without MSP.