What Datto's 5 Partner Conference Announcements Mean To MSPs, VARs
By The Business Solutions Network
Tuesday morning, Datto founder and CEO, Austin McChord, took the stage in New Orleans to kick off the company’s annual partner conference. It didn’t take long before McChord’s presentation moved from a welcome message into all the big announcements that company had to make. Quickly, the five announcements were:
- Linux agent for backups
- Backupify for Office365
- File backup and sharing
- Updated partner portal
- Datto DNA (Datto Networking Appliance)
You can read all the details on these announcements here. However, MSPs who weren’t in attendance might be scratching their heads over how some of this news applies to them. Here’s why you should care (or not) about these announcements.
Linux agent — McChord’s first announcement concerning a Linux agent for backup got a hearty round of applause from the 500 partners in attendance. According to McChord, a Linux agent was one of the most requested features over the past few years. It took that long for Datto to bring this capapbility to market not due to laziness or lack of caring, but because it was such a difficult thing to pull off well.
McChord explained that Linux doesn’t have volume shadow copy like Windows. Linux has dozens of popular file systems and hundreds of kernel versions. There’s no vendor to call for help and no standard developer documentation. In fact, with Linux there are no standards. It took a lot of hard work, but McChord believes Datto got its Linux agent done right. He describes the capability as “true image-based backup for Linux, which brings VSS capabilities, installs without a restart, provides real-time block-level change tracking, and broad support for many Linux distros.” Finally, the Linux agent is fully supported in SIRIS and the Datto cloud and is available today on every SIRIS device ever sold.
Backupify for Office365 — McChord explained that, while business data is moving to the cloud, SaaS needs just as much support as local apps, and MSPs have a big support role to play. “MSPs will become the architects of these solutions and it will power the future,” he said. He went on to explain that businesses want control of their data, not to feel like they’re renting it. With this in mind, in addition to the big push Microsoft is pushing to migrate users to Office 365 (O365), Datto has created a solution that brings automated, secure backup for data stored in O365. Datto showed a demo of a backup and restore of some accidentally deleted emails and it looked pretty seamless. McChord added getting billing right was important in creating this solution. “Some partners eat the difference because tracking changes is so painful,” he said. Datto responded by creating simple tiers to make billing easy for MSPs, this protecting margins.
File backup and sharing — McChord made some initial points: SMBs want to backup files without protecting the whole machine. Dropbox just isn’t built for business. SMBs want something where they can do restores and check versions without calling their MSP. Enterprise file sync and share are too expensive for SMBs.
To respond to these factors, Datto partnered with ownCloud to create a file sync engine for Mac, Windows, and Linux. According to McChord, ownCloud has enterprise features, is trusted by Fortune 500 companies, but is difficult to install, setup, and configure. There’s a free version, but it doesn’t contain the features needed. Datto worked with the company to take the enterprise version and make it available to SMBs. The Datto version installs and auto-configures in a few clicks. It’s available today on every SIRIS ever sold. In a further attempt to protect an MSP’s margins, Datto has added this functionality free of charge.
Updated partner portal — Ian McChord, Datto's product director, took the stage to make this announcement. He explained that the difference between revenue and profit is cost and the biggest MSP cost is time (to manage). With this in mind, Datto sought a new way of thinking about status’ and dashboards. The result is a portal page that provides a stream of events and useful information. This feed connects problems to solutions to convert more revenue to profit. From the dashboard, MSPs can create support tickets, which are prefilled with contact info, with a click. If MSPs prefer to manage their Datto devices through their PSA or RMM tool, Datto is making the stream available for integration.
Datto DNA — Finally, Datto announced a new piece of hardware, its Datto Networking Appliance. This router was built from the ground up to address shortcomings the company perceives in existing networking solutions. Austin McChord says that a third of support tickets are related to ancient hardware. “User interfaces for routers are slow,” he says. “They’re hard to configure and troubleshooting is a pain. Plus, there’s no good way to centrally manage many routers. They aren’t intelligent in helping you improve your networks.” Datto DNA lets you remotely troubleshoot a client’s internet connection, even when the ISP is down. The solution integrates with existing PSA and RMM tools. It makes “easy-to-build VPNs even without a static IP and keeps you informed of changes that happen on the network.” Additionally, there’s built-in redundancy. If the Internet connection goes down, the device switches over to a 4G connection. Interestingly, Datto is paying the cost of the 4G so there’s no need for MSPs or their customers to pay for a broadband contract that will seldom be used. This router is expected to be available in September, pending FCC approval.
Without a doubt, the recurring theme of McChord's announcements was that Datto is striving to address the most significant needs it sees MSPs facing, while ensuring that it's protecting the margins of those MSPs.