Almost as surprising as Fred Voccola’s decision to step down as Kaseya CEO in early January was the way he did it – relatively quietly, with his only quote coming via press release.

Recently, however, he began talking to shed light on why he’ll give up running day-to-day operations and stay on as vice chairman of Kaseya. Voccola broke his silence in interviews with Christopher Hutton of Channel Futures and Rich Freeman of Channelholic. You have to give Voccola credit for consistency – he told both interviewers a remarkably similar story.

Here’s what we learned:

He’s not finished with Kaseya. Voccola told both interviewers he will retain responsibility for strategy, product direction and company direction as vice chairman. He will relinquish day-to-day responsibilities to the new CEO. Voccola pointed out he’s Kaseya's largest individual shareholder and he has a great financial stake in its success.

He is leaving behind the daily grind. He told both interviewers he worked 80-hour weeks for most of his 10-year tenure as Kaseya CEO. Now he’s down to 50 weeks.

Kaseya 365 was beginning of the end. Voccola said he told the Kaseya board he would retire last May, shortly after the release of Kaseya 365. "It's about time that I go make a change, and I should start looking at stepping down,” he told Channel Futures that he told the board.

Kaseya had a head start preparing. Waiting to make Voccola’s decision to step down public, Kaseya began remaking its C-suite. Its COO, CRO, CPO and CMO have been on board for less than nine months.But none of them are Kaseya CEO candidates because …

The new CEO will be an outsider. Voccola saidthe search for a successor has largely involved candidates outside the company.“There’s not a lot of people that have run a 5,000-person software company,” Voccola told ChannelInsider. “We didn’t believe we had anybody internally that would be the right candidate.”

He’s still dropping hints. Voccola likes to tease about the next big thing coming at Kaseya, without giving too much away. That’s still the case. “We have an announcement coming in Las Vegas at our customer conference about a key part of our platform that will make the announcement of Kaseya 365 Endpoint and User look small,” he told Channel Futures. “This will be the end game of end games. This will finally deliver on the capability for MSPs to automate 50-60% of what they do at a fraction of the cost of what they're doing for them.

So as usual with Voccola and Kaseya, we’re still left wondering what’s next.