735 Nadir Merchant: Unveiling Kaseya 365 User

[Uncle Marv]
Hello, friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast presented by NetAlly. We are, well, I'm going to say live. But by the time you see this, it won't be.

But we are in Miami. Yes, I traveled south of the glades to visit the wonderful Fontainebleau rest resort. It is a resort, right?

It is a resort. Okay. So I am here at DattoCon 2024.

And sitting in a special room specifically for podcasters. And today I am interviewing Nadir Merchant. He has been here before, I believe it was back in May, when I visited a mothership.

So it's all great. Now, let me make sure your title is the same. You are still General Manager, IT Operations, something.

MS Suite and IT Operations Suite. There we go. Yeah.

All right. So you are very capable of telling us all the wonderful news that's coming down the pike because I heard that there is a ton of stuff that is going to be introduced. Although most of it is just an extension of our Kaseya 365, right?

You could look at it that way.

[Nadir Merchant]
So we are launching at the event here, Kaseya 365 User. So this is a new product offering. It is following a similar concept to Kaseya 365 Endpoint, which is what we launched in April at Kaseya Connect in Las Vegas.

This is the next iteration of Kaseya 365. So Kaseya 365 User focuses on everything that you need to protect a user as opposed to Endpoint, which is all around the endpoints and everything you need to protect, manage, and back up an endpoint. Now we're focusing on protecting and backing up, recovering a user.

So this gives you things like your email protection, anti-phishing software, your security awareness training, phishing simulation, SaaS backup, including email. It's an entire bundle. I wouldn't call it a bundle.

It's a product. The difference between a bundle and a product is a bundle groups together similar value proposition items that are still independent. We look at this very differently.

Kaseya 365 is all about bringing a unified product together and how we make it a product as opposed to a bundle is by integrations. Making sure that the tools work together seamlessly, they feel like one product, they look and feel the same, they have a similar login experience. All these things are identical with Kaseya 365 User.

So you only log in once and you get access to the entire platform. You have the same experience across all the tools, they onboard the same way, and they're all workflow integrated so that way we can make technicians' lives easier.

[Uncle Marv]
So that's very similar to when Endpoint was launched earlier this year. Having users look at this from the standpoint of, I don't have to integrate all these different products and hope that they work because the vendors play nice with each other. Everything is under the Kaseya umbrella and like you said, seamless.

So now we've got Endpoint and User and the reason I said bundle by mistake was because in my own current stack, those are all separate. So this is making everything more unified. So Endpoint and User and by the time this airs, folks, this will have already been announced here at the conference and I believe it is going to be, I don't want to say a record breaker because you guys really broke some stuff with the 365 Endpoint.

[Nadir Merchant]
Hopefully in a good way, we did break some things, yeah. I think this will be a record breaker. It is a much bigger offering than Endpoint in terms of the potential audience size and I think that it's going to be very exciting.

The value proposition that we've created here is absolutely phenomenal between the automations and then the incredible price that we can offer with this type of product offering is just unparalleled to anything on the market. There's just nothing out there like it and I think it's going to be really exciting for our community. Right.

[Uncle Marv]
Great. So when you look at all of this, being able to do everything from what eventually could be a single pane of glass obviously is awesome, but I know that the announcement of Cooper was a big part of what makes a lot of this work. So how is Cooper helping with the user side as it did with the Endpoint?

[Nadir Merchant]
Yeah, so we launched Cooper AI about three years ago with Cooper Insights. It was at Vegas at one of our Connect events there, about three and a half years ago now. And Cooper's continued to evolve since we launched Cooper Insights way back when.

Cooper Insights is the machine learning technology that helps organizations get the most out of the software that they purchase from us. It gives them insights into what they could be doing better, how they can better utilize the software based on what it observes in their actual usage of the tools. So Cooper evolved from there and we have two big fundamental new applications inside of the Cooper umbrella that can help empower IT teams.

First of all is we have Cooper Bots. So Cooper Bots we announced last year here at this event in DattoCon. It's been in limited release for quite some time.

It's now generally available for all IT Complete customers no matter which module you're using. You have access to Cooper Bots. You access it through the Casio One interface, totally free and included.

And it is an automation platform that allows our users to create autonomous automations of their own creation that work across IT Complete. It's very similar to a robotic process or a business process automation tool where you can say when these things happen, when I observe, when the system observes these behaviors in any application across IT Complete, take some action somewhere else. So a ticket comes in of XYZ nature, I want you to go run some action in the RMM to remediate it or I want you to run an action in EDR or whatever, multiple actions.

I want you to update some documentation, whatever the actions are. So inside of Cooper Bots we have a library of these Cooper Bots that are already available that you can import and start using or you can create your own from scratch and build your own kind of compositions of these different automations that are fully autonomous that they run on their own. Very nice.

[Uncle Marv]
Very nice. So, I mean, you just said a lot there and I think it's really going to help people because the bots literally can walk us through steps whenever we get a ticket and need to kind of be guided as to what needs to be done next helps our level one techs tremendously. So that sounds fantastic.

[Nadir Merchant]
Yeah. And so Cooper Bots is the second iteration or second application of our AI. The third one is Cooper Copilot.

So we launched Cooper Copilot for IT Glue back in April of this year. I've seen that. Yeah, in Vegas.

So that was the first kind of a gen AI application that we built using the Cooper AI engine. So Cooper Copilot for IT Glue, it's a bit of a mouthful, it provides very robust automated documentation capabilities to our users. So we will automate creation of related items in IT Glue, automate creation of flexible assets.

These are things that third party integrations couldn't do for us. Now we can do them with gen AI. It's really powerful.

So here at the event, we're announcing a couple of new features for Cooper Copilot for IT Glue and we're announcing Cooper Copilot for PSA. So I'll give you a rundown on those capabilities. So for Cooper Copilot for IT Glue, the first thing we're doing that's now live at this event is a tool called Smart Assist.

Smart Assist helps with curating your documentation. So one of the challenges with documentation is you have all the documentation in the system. The longer you have the system, the more entropy you get and you end up with a bunch of stale documentation that's not useful.

That's not helpful to anybody, right?

[Uncle Marv]
Nope. And before you go on, I will attest to that because just this morning, I had Kim in my office. I wanted her to update a whole bunch of stuff.

And some of the Cooper is already saying, hey, you might want to fill out this here. So me reminding her feels like a pain, but Cooper reminding her is awesome.

[Nadir Merchant]
Yeah. So Smart Assist will help organizations curate their documentation by letting them know, hey, this documentation is stale, it hasn't been updated in a year. This documentation, nobody's used this documentation in two years, it's probably time to archive it or delete it, right?

It does those type of cleanup tasks to make the system easier to use and make sure that the quality information stays on the board. So that was the first thing that we announced for Cooper Copilot for IT Glue. The next part is really, really exciting.

This is super cool. It's not live yet, but early next year, we are going to be launching the Smart SOP Generator for IT Glue. This thing is badass.

Am I allowed to say that on your show? Yes, you are. All right, great.

You certainly are. It's too late anyways. So the Smart SOP Generator will actually record a user's behavior when they turn it on.

So they have to say, start recording, it'll record their behavior and write an SOP for them based on what they do inside the browser. So it'll track all their actions, it'll take screenshots of everything they're doing, it'll show the screenshots, it'll annotate them with arrows showing, hey, this is where you clicked, this is where you have to type in, and it'll write instructions to go along with those screenshots and generate an SOP for you. All the user has to do is click around the browser.

This is so cool.

[Uncle Marv]
So you said user, because my first thought is this would be for me and my text, not necessarily an end user.

[Nadir Merchant]
Yeah, not an end user. This is a technician. Technician's about to run some tasks, they realize, hey, we don't have an SOP for this, so they hit the record button, they execute the task, and now guess what?

They finish the work that they need to do, and they don't have to write an SOP because it's there. Sweet. That's cool.

[Uncle Marv]
Because I know people right now are trying to use ChatGPT for that, and some of these other websites, so having that built in, awesome.

[Nadir Merchant]
Yeah, and the cool thing about us building it in is not just that it's lower barrier to entry and it's kind of integrated into the tool, but we can make it purpose-built for our use case. So it's a lot more specific than truly Gen AI, which is independent and has to be generic. We can make it specific for our use case, we can make it intelligent enough to look at the environment and the account, the documentation that's there, and make it contextually relevant.

So it can be much more powerful and can deliver much better outcomes. Right.

[Uncle Marv]
Now, how much of this is actually going to be curated based on the company? So MSP to MSP? Because we obviously would like to leverage what others are doing, but at the same time, our policies might be a little bit different if we're working with law firms or dentists or whatever.

[Nadir Merchant]
Well, with the SOP generator, it's all based on the user's actions, right? So it records what the person is doing.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay, so it's specific to them. It's totally specific to them. Yeah.

Nice. And then with the documentation stale type of thing, that again, internal to your tenant, and you're not going to be looking at, hey, nobody in the industry has used this for two years.

[Nadir Merchant]
Yeah, it's looking at the usage of your actual documentation, so hey, nobody's read this documentation or people read it, but when they went to execute a ticket, they weren't able to be successful. So therefore, this documentation is probably stale. There might be something wrong with this.

Oh, that would be interesting. Those are the types of insights that it's looking at to figure out what is stale versus what is documentation that should just be deleted.

[Uncle Marv]
So would that be something that's tied to, let's say, a checklist in ITILU that we've set up that people may have to do another step, but then don't add it?

[Nadir Merchant]
Conceptually, yes. The way it exists today, it's only for true documents in ITILU, not for checklists. But the goal will be to make this actually for passwords, configs, and for checklists as well.

Okay. Sounds fantastic. All right.

But that won't be live until next year? The version of it that exists for documents is live now. The checklists, passwords, and configs will be next year.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. All right. So something to look forward to.

Yeah. Will it be out before the next conference? Yes.

Absolutely.

[Nadir Merchant]
Yeah. Before the next big conference, which is Kaseya Connect last August.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, I meant your conference.

[Nadir Merchant]
I'm not talking about other conferences here. We do small events throughout the year as well.

[Uncle Marv]
Right.

[Nadir Merchant]
So we have an M&A symposium in January, which will be 300 people, and then we do our local events twice a week. So there's a lot of conferences for us between now and then. But Vegas is the big show, Kaseya Connect in April of next year.

There'll be 5,000, 6,000 people there. And yes, these things will be live before that.

[Uncle Marv]
I talk about the big shows. Yeah. Fair enough.

Unfortunately, and I'm sorry to say this, I don't travel to Miami for the small shows. I'm just right up the road, but that's a big ask sometimes. So you're not going to come to LA for the M&A symposium, which will be 300 people in January.

Well, that's west of the Mississippi, so that's a no. Unless there's a direct flight. There's a direct flight to LA.

[Nadir Merchant]
There is? To LA?

[Uncle Marv]
Miami to LA. But what is it, six hours? Yes.

Yeah. Okay. Oh, my goodness gracious.

Well, I do hope the weather picks up, because it was raining when I came in. It was a little rainy this morning, yeah, unfortunately.

[Nadir Merchant]
Yeah. But the other thing we haven't talked about yet is Cooper Co-Pilot for Autotask. This is brand new.

We just launched it.

[Uncle Marv]
Oh, Autotask.

[Nadir Merchant]
It's super exciting. Well, for PSA, I said Autotask because we had ACL this morning, but really it's actually for both PSAs. Okay.

So Cooper Co-Pilot for PSA. It's available for both Autotask and BMS. It does some really exciting things. So when a ticket gets escalated to somebody, one of the things that's very difficult for them is they have to figure out what's happened.

They have to read all the comments and all the back and forth, and it's all out of context. It's very jumbled. It's messy.

Well, now they have a button that just tells them what's going on. The resolution summary will automatically, or ticket summarization will automatically just summarize the ticket and say, hey, here's exactly what's going on with this ticket. It takes two minutes, they are up to speed, and they know exactly what's going on.

This is really cool.

[Uncle Marv]
So I was looking at something last week, and one of the things that I had been wanting is when a user generates a ticket, a lot of their information just comes along with that ticket. So is that part of that as well? What kind of information?

Like maybe a last screenshot, system information, user information, how long the machine's been up and running.

[Nadir Merchant]
So like information from the... So some of that we do, some of it we don't. So we don't do like screenshots from the machine or run diagnostics on the machine, but we do things like snapshot hardware information so you can see CPU and memory utilization at the time that the ticket was created, things like that.

And that's going to continue to expand and you'll see more and more of those types of capabilities like you described at the time. I'd like to get us to a point where you can do things like automatically realize that okay, this user is creating a ticket for slow internet, so therefore I want to run a bunch of internet diagnostics and put it in the ticket at the time they create the ticket. Because you go look at it two hours later and the problem might be resolved or at least not present at that moment, and then you say, oh yeah, everything seems fine now, and then three hours later it's back again, just never-ending frustration for the end user.

So if we can get that information at the time, we can hopefully root cause it and actually solve it for real.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, I do have a client that that happens a lot because on a shared internet, somebody's downloading or watching a movie or something they shouldn't be doing, and somebody else is trying to connect remotely and they don't know why, and it just magically clears up. We need more stuff for that. So all of this...

You don't trust magic with technology.

[Nadir Merchant]
Magic scares me because you don't know what's going on, you're like, what? At least if you find a problem and fix it, then you can be confident that, hey, okay, it's fixed.

[Uncle Marv]
Or at least find the reason for it. That's usually half the battle, as long as you can tell them, hey look, somebody was printing out a 300-page medical summary at the time that you were trying to open up that PDF. For lawyers, at least, that helps.

So Nadir, this sounds like a very big conference, so it is day one, so I haven't gotten around to see everything yet, but I hope to do that more today and tomorrow, and the conference goes through Wednesday. So here we are, October 28th, 29th, and 30th, and block party? Absolutely.

Yeah? Yeah. We'll have a good time.

All right. Yeah. I'd say see you there, but I won't be there.

Oh, this is so bad. Why not? Why won't you be there?

I have commitments already. Okay. All right.

[Nadir Merchant]
I got client stuff.

[Uncle Marv]
I got to pay the bills. Clients are important. Take care of those clients.

[Nadir Merchant]
Make sure they're happy.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So those are all big things. So let me just check with you and make sure there wasn't something else that we, because you guys are announcing a lot.

[Nadir Merchant]
We're announcing a lot. There's actually a ton of other things that I didn't talk about. In fact, some of that Cooper Copilot stuff, we still didn't even get to.

In Autotask, we also have resolution summaries. So in addition to summarizing what's going on with the ticket, we actually write the resolution notes for the ticket, for the technician. We have a language assistant tool that when they're writing their notes to communicate with the customer, it'll automatically clean up language and make it more customer friendly.

Okay. Again, nice. And there's dozens of other features.

I mean, there'll be so many things that these shows, I mean, we'd be here all day if I went through it all. But those are some of the really big, exciting ones.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, these shows are just to do the quick announcements. People can get to see whatever, get in contact with their account manager. But down the road, I hope to talk with somebody that we can go more in depth.

And of course, I'm going to have to get my own account manager to sit with me and stuff. So we'll go through all that. All right, Nadir, I know that I've got to get you back out on the floor.

So thank you for stopping by. It was good to see you again. Thank you so much for having us.

Really nice seeing you too. All right. That's going to do it, folks.

We'll be back soon. Here from DattoCon in Miami, Florida, at the Fontainebleau. Holla!