technologyreseller.co.uk MSP 41 solutions. One year ago it launched its first major AI initiative, Cooper AI, to help customers use its products better and more extensively. Cooper (named after Voccola’s dog) does this by monitoring user activity and providing insights into how they can do things more efficiently and more securely. “An MSP has to deal with so many things at once without the infrastructure that an HSBC has or a Royal Bank of Scotland or a Rolls Royce has,” explained Voccola. “An MSP doesn't have a dedicated group of people to monitor their tools and ensure they're trained on them, so we built Cooper to do that. And he's free. It's like having a constant training and management and best practices organisation making sure you have the best chance to be successful and making sure you don't do something that can hurt you, like leaving a security setting undone. Cooper will say ‘By the way, you should do this. If you don't know how, here's a link to the video that shows you how and here's how you can sign up for training to get certified’. “Cooper also looks at the people using the Kaseya platform. If you hired a new person yesterday and that new person logs into the Kaseya platform, Cooper will look at what certifications they have and will send the administrator a note saying Alex has logged on to your platform and she hasn't been trained or certified for the things that she's using. Here are the links to get her online training and here's the link to schedule Zoom training because, as we both know, IT and security done incorrectly can be dangerous.” Voccola is keen to distance Cooper from the much mocked Microsoft Clippy, pointing out that it doesn’t need to pop up all the time and can be scheduled to show its insights at a time of your choosing, for example at the end of the day or the end of the week. He adds that unlike Clippy, Cooper has already demonstrated its value to MSPs, citing figures showing that MSPs acts on 42% of the 24 insights that Cooper typically raises for each organisation. In the future, he expects Kaseya to make greater use of AI, bringing even more benefits to customers. “Cooper was our first major AI initiative and you'll see a lot more leveraging of AI-based technologies. We do a lot of automation and AI is great for enabling automation. I think that's going to allow MSPs to serve more endpoints per technician, earn more revenue per technician and serve more customers per technician. Thirty-six months from now, our platform will make an MSP 150% more efficient,” he said. addition to IT Complete 2.0, include Datto Endpoint Backup for Servers, giving MSPs the option to protect servers directly to the secure Datto Cloud; Microsoft 365 Management in Datto RMM, enabling technicians to diagnose and solve the most common user issues across all their M365 tenants directly in RMM; the relaunched Datto Networking Appliance (DNA), a highperformance network router for ‘always on’ internet connections with fully integrated 4G LTE failover; and Universal Ransomware Rollback (included with Datto Endpoint Detection and Response), which gives the ability to detect and revert encrypted files back to their original state and restore deleted files, such as those hit by a wiper attack or deleted by accident. Looking to the future, Kaseya has been addressing the skills challenge facing MSPs with the launch of the Remote IT and Security Management (RITSM) 40hour certification programme. Delivered in partnership with 50 universities and 100 private educational organisations, RITSM aims to create a community of technicians trained in Kaseya products, with a target to certify 5,000 by the end of this year and 100,000 by the end of 2024. AI for automation AI is another way in which Kaseya can improve skills levels and knowledge of its AI for automation How is Kaseya planning to make use of AI in its products and when can we expect to see further developments in the AI area? We put this question Ranjan Singh, Chief Product Officer at Kaseya. Ranjan Singh: “I can give you some simple examples that I would call low hanging fruit. Think about a customer getting incoming tickets, service requests. About 60% of them are repetitive – reset my password, I can’t login to this account, I can't access this, the VPN router is down. These are common, repetitive tasks that the likes of Chat GPT can really automate. “So, one area we are exploring is the natural language processing of incoming tickets. You write your ticket request in free-form English or whatever your local language is. We analyse it and because we know how to automate certain actions, we’re able to automate those tickets. This way you can reduce the technician’s workload by about 60%. That's the first area. “Another area is around our IT Complete platform and the data we have across its modules. Feed that data into an AI engine and the insights get richer. Today, our insights are focused on individual modules. When we start looking at insights across modules, we might see that you have a consistent pattern of working between, say, three modules to solve a particular issue. That gives us insight into what to automate. We can go in and automate those functions. “Microsoft are going to come out with Copilot. Many in the SMB segment are highly reliant on M365 and we see some opportunity there too. We can co-locate ourselves in the Copilot environment, which will enable our customers to, if you like, go outside the IT Complete platform to automate the onboarding of a new user – go to Microsoft, purchase a licence, configure the user, configure their endpoint via RMM. You can literally automate the entire stream.” So you don’t see AI as a threat in any way? Ranjan Singh: “Oh no, not at all. It's all about driving efficiency for the technician. Our customers will get more profitable because that same five-person shop can now deliver services to maybe five times as many customers. We are leading the space in building integrations and AI will only make us more efficient both in building integrations and in automating functions that customers are looking for.” When might we see further developments from Kaseya in this area? Ranjan Singh: “It could be towards the end of this year. At the moment, I'd say we’re still in the research phase, the proof of concept phase. That said, we already have Cooper AI; that's already there. We also have Graphus, an automated phishing defence platform for email, which has its own AI engine. So we have AI engines scattered around IT Complete. This is about enhancing those AI engines to look across modules.” Ranjan Singh One year ago Kaseya launched its first major AI initiative, Cooper AI, to help customers use its products better and more extensively
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=