In the first three years of its managed service provider (MSP) Foundation project, Kaspersky has achieved fourfold growth in sales among its MSPs. In addition, the number of active partners has increased three and a half times since 2018, with significant growth in countries within Europe, North America, and South Africa.
The introduction of a flexible pay-as-you-go monthly subscription payment plan, user-friendly License Management Portal for partners, and multi-layer cybersecurity product stack has made the Kaspersky MSP programme attractive and beneficial for service providers.
The MSP market is expected to double in the next few years, growing from US$243.33 billion in 2021 to US$557.10 billion in 2028. It is not only an increase in client base that the majority of MSPs reported but also a focus on expanding their service portfolio, as a recent global survey of service providers revealed. With data breaches, cloud adoption and other unsolved security challenges named by clients in the study, IT security services have been gaining weight and becoming the ‘must have’ in MSPs’ service portfolios.
“We’ve come a long way and our partners note this. Our efforts have been recognised with an MSP Innovation Award in the category of Best Managed Services Partner (MSP) Programme,” said Veniamin Levtsov, VP Corporate Business, Kaspersky. “For further MSP development, we will focus even more on process automation, portal functionality enhancement, and aligning more products with the MSP-readiness concept. These initiatives will support the great promise of transforming our resellers into managed security service partners.”
Kaspersky’s focus on MSPs is in line with the global trend. Between 2019 and 2021, Kaspersky increased MSP sales to four times their starting point – with 75% year-on-year growth shown in 2021. As a part of this global initiative, many regions demonstrated significant growth, including France, Italy, Northern and Central Europe, North America, Russia, Africa and Brazil.
In addition to actively attracting new partners, the results according to Kaspersky, were achieved by securing a solid retention rate, meaning its MSP partners stay with the company for a long time.
Within the MSP Foundation project, Kaspersky developed tools that automate billing processes and facilitate business interactions between partners and vendors. With a dedicated partner programme and Licence Management Portal introduced in 2020, MSPs were given adaptive financial conditions with flexible daily billing. They can now quickly and easily manage licenses in a self-service portal and bring security services to the market faster with a cost-efficient approach. The new pay-as-you-go subscription plan allows MSPs to benefit from an OPEX model and to alter license conditions whenever their customers require, which means paying only for what they need at that moment.
Another area that ensured success of the MSP Foundation project was the development and adaptation of Kaspersky’s portfolio to service providers of various sizes, security expertise levels and verticals they cover. Kaspersky products allow MSPs to automatically safeguard customers’ endpoints and cloud workloads from threats.
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