In 2017, Ben Estephan and the Inhouse-Support team undertook a project to evaluate RMMs. After a thorough evaluation, they purchased Kaseya VSA and BMS. To help get started, Ben also sprang for dedicated onboarding and ongoing support through Kasyea’s Office 360 program. Given Kaseya’s maturity in the channel and product legacy, he signed a multi-year deal without hesitation for a discount.
The first sign of trouble came during onboarding. Kaseya is a complex system that is known for its steep learning curve. In the days leading up to the training, Ben’s team struggled with the platform’s complexity, outdated interface, and unintuitive workflows.
“We tried to get to know the platform ahead of the training, learn the interface, and understand Kaseya’s workflows, but it was complex and confusing. It took forever to navigate and even simple tasks could take 3-4 steps to complete. Some critical processes, like Windows patching, just wouldn’t work.”
— Ben Estephan, President, Inhouse-Support
When the onboarding session finally started, Ben’s team was excited to get started and Ben was optimistic about his investment. Then the training began and Ben realized what it actually was — a lengthy sales pitch about what Kaseya can do, and what additional products were available for purchase. All of his team’s questions about how to navigate the platform, how to accomplish specific tasks, and how to setup the platform were diverted to support. Not only did they not get the training they had paid for, but his team was derailed for a day from learning the platform on their own.
Over the next two years, Ben and his team built up expertise with the Kaseya platform on their own. They developed in-house processes, trained each other, and got the system working as well as they could. Inhouse-Support grew — adding more clients and expanding their team. While the former came quickly, finding qualified technicians to support the new clients proved to be challenging, however. “Whenever I’d hire a new technician, if they didn’t have experience directly with Kaseya, it could take months for them to start producing revenue for me,” Ben says.
Even as they added endpoints and became a larger customer for Kaseya, a true partnership never materialized. Support tickets would remain unanswered for months or even years with no response. Other tickets did receive a response, but were never really resolved. The dedicated Kaseya agent that Ben had opted to pay for through Office 360 never completed a single task assigned to him.
‘I’d finally had enough with Kaseya — the product wasn’t working and support wasn’t responding,” Ben says. “When I reached out to a VP at Kaseya and he told me he could help, I thought I could see light at the end of the tunnel.” When the meeting occurred, however, Kaseya offered Ben a deal — a discount on premium support for faster resolutions, but only if he’d sign up for an additional three year contract. “I was done. I couldn’t do it anymore,” Ben says. “I had been locked into a contract long enough, and I wasn’t going to stay for three more years and pay more for the support I wasn’t getting.”
Evaluating RMMs
Ben kicked off his search for a new RMM by laying out his criteria for success. This time, many of his criteria were direct responses to his experience with Kaseya. “I was looking for two things: a tool that was intuitive and easy-to-use and a vendor that offered better support,” Ben explains. “I was pretty jaded about both and didn’t expect much. I just needed better than what I had.”
Ben’s RMM evaluation from two years prior allowed him to cross off a few legacy vendors right away. He and his team tried out a few newer players in the field but found that, just like Kaseya, many RMMs’ workflows were slow and unintuitive, requiring 3 – 4 steps to accomplish simple tasks.
When Ben first heard about NinjaOne, he was skeptical. NinjaOne hadn’t been in his initial round of evaluations. After checking out reviews, he decided to get a demo. The whole Inhouse-Support team joined the call. Within the first five minutes, he saw a difference. “It’s really basic, but when the sales guy showed my team how easy it was to add a device – literally just one click then ‘add device’ — my whole team was shocked,” Ben says. “We sat through the whole demo, but by itself that was enough for me to try it out.” Inhouse-Support signed up for a trial that day.
The demo had clearly showcased how easy NinjaOne would be for his techs to use, but what about support? Given his experience with Kaseya, Ben was skeptical and hesitant to take any RMM vendor’s promises at face value. He needed to evaluate the quality of NinjaOne’s support for himself before he’d sign off on a move. Ben’s team rarely uses support, but when they do they expect the same level of responsiveness they give to Inhouse-Support clients.
“We evaluated support by using it during the trial. The level of knowledge of the NinjaOne support team was super high. The support team doesn’t just run through a script — they really know the product and how to help. I have never experienced the speed or knowledge of support the NinjaOne team exhibited with any other RMM vendor. “
— Ben Estephan, President, InHouse-Support
Inhouse-Support switched from Kaseya VSA and BMS to NinjaOne and SherpaDesk and hasn’t looked back.
Working with NinjaOne
Now that Inhouse-Support uses NinjaOne, there have been a few major shifts internally.
“Ninja has almost no learning curve,” Ben says. “The UI is easy to use and intuitive and has made my team more efficient. Onboarding a new technician no longer takes a month. It takes half a day.” Ben points to NinjaOne’s free unlimited training being helpful in getting technicians up-to-speed on new features, as well.
The quality of support has also been night-and-day over Kaseya. While they haven’t run into too many challenges, when Ben’s team does contact support, they know they’ll get a response — often within the hour. Having a partner that can solve his team’s challenges on first contact is a totally new experience for Ben.
“Every interaction with NinjaOne isn’t about getting me to sign a new contract or buy something I don’t need,” Ben says. “I feel like I have an actual relationship with the people I talk to at Ninja.”
Customer Story
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