The data protection landscape is changing fast.
MSPs need partners that deeply understand what they’re selling, whom they’re selling to, and how to generate and grow revenue as market conditions change and new opportunities arise.
Co-presented by Probax and Veeam, discover the best-kept sales secret for MSPs to accelerate revenue growth in 2023 – Disaster Recovery as a Service.
What you’ll learn:
- The DR market opportunity for your MSP
- What is driving all this demand for DR?
- The hurdles MSPs need to overcome
- Gain a competitive advantage and capture more demand
- How to get started with Probax + Veeam and accelerate MSP revenue…
Watch our webinar on-demand
Read the webinar transcript
Tony Stratton: Thank you all for joining today's discussion, which is The DRaaS Revenue Opportunity for MSPs - Unlock the best-kept secret in 2023. Today we'll be covering meaningful insights, providing you with tools and tips on how to grow your MSP business with disaster recovery as a service, otherwise known DRaaS, and we'll often refer to DRaaS throughout the presentation as well in today's discussion. Okay? Okay.
So before I introduce my co-host, my name is Tony Stratton. I am the Director of Dales for APAC here at Probax. I do recognize a large number of attendees on the call today are existing MSPs for Probax. But just quickly, for all of the new attendees, Probax is a global Veeam Cloud Service Provider headquartered out of Perth in WA with offices all over Australia.
We've been providing award-winning innovation for over 15 years with our highly skilled data protection leaders.
We've got a couple of Veeam Vanguards, we've got engineers and consultants all on the team. What I'm excited about today's session is on the back of many discussions we've been having with our MSPs that are now looking at DRaaS instead of an on-premise disaster recovery solution and digging deeper into why they need DR as a service and the benefits of DR as a service, than the regular backup solutions.
So both Probax and Veeam have been having lots of meetings and discussions regarding backup versus DRaaS and the advantages of the customers, as well as importantly, the opportunity for MSPs to open up new doors and provide such an important and critical requirement to clients of all different sizes.
It's important to note is definitely not just for the large in town, the enterprise customers. It's relevant to all sizes and all businesses. It's critical these days.
Joining me on this discussion today, I am delighted to introduce you all to someone who I work very closely with and have done now for the past several years. He's an extremely nice guy, Alan Warmington, who is the Director of Cloud and Service Cloud Providers at Veeam. Alan, welcome mate.
Alan Warmington: Hey, Tony, how are you?
Tony Stratton: Good, thank you.
Alan Warmington: Excellent. I appreciate the introduction there. Being referred to as a nice guy, is wonderful. Thank you. I appreciate it. Alan Warmington, my name, Director of Cloud and Service Provider business here at Veeam for Australia / New Zealand.
As Tony mentioned, been working with Probax now for the six years I've been at Veeam. And look, I thoroughly enjoyed that partnership as it's grown year over year for the last six years. Uh, it's been phenomenal. Um, the reason why I'm excited about this called Tony, though, and I, I probably didn't, you know, we didn't spend a lot of time Marin out of this earlier, but, um, what, what pros have built here with, with Veeam, but, but really the credit goes to you guys.
How we see you differentiating in market is it's, you're not in competition with our existing MSPs cloud providers. You are there to provide additional value, incremental services, value offerings to MSPs today. And I think that is something that's unique. You know, we have a pretty broad portfolio ecosystem of, um, of service providers today who leverage our technology to create solutions for their clients. Uh, but so many of those that are using Veeam also use prox, um, and value in both, which I, I absolutely love.
That's why I think the partnership has grown to the extent that it has. So, um, really appreciate this opportunity.
Tony Stratton: Great. And thanks for joining us, mate. Really appreciate it as well. And, and also the partnership. It's been a long partnership and, uh, it's a very strong one. So we really appreciate your support. Tanks, Alan.
What we're gonna cover today, the first paragraphs, you know, I'll, I'll just note it, but, we'll go into more detail as, as the, uh, the session unfolds.
It is kind of more of a discussion format today. It's not your regular PowerPoint type presentation. It's more of a chat between Provax and Veeam, which is great. And I think all of our MSPs will get a lot out of it.
The data protection landscape is changing fast. MSPs need partners that deeply understand what they're selling. And this is really key, right? Because, um, having subject matter experts and understanding what are the questions to ask when you're talking about DR as a service, we come across many MSPs that say to us, you know, the customers come back and said, how much is DRaaS?
Well, I think we need to sort of, you know, turn that around a little bit and ask the right questions and find out, you know, what is the impact of business. And further down, you're gonna see a lot of slides in regards to what are some of these real key qualification questions.
We're gonna be asking to help you open up these new opportunities. And it's very, very topical as well. You'll see on the back of what's happening in the market, and you'll see really important trends that Veeam will go into why this is such an important discussion and such an important topic for many, many customers right now to open up brand new opportunities.
When we say it's the best kept secret is because it is a fantastic area to discuss in regards to opening up new doors. We're gonna cover today the DR market opportunity for you as an s p, what is driving all of this demand, uh, the hurdles MSPs need to overcome, which is really, really key, and how to get started with Probax and Veeam and how we are better together.
Alan Warmington: Awesome. Very cool. I might jump in here, Tony. So, firstly I want to introduce the viewers today and, and those that might be listening to recordings.
There's probably two bits of research that Veeam puts out. Um, annual, it's been going for several years now. I think we're in the fourth year of, of these reports.
And I wanna be clear, so these are the, the largest, certainly the data protection trends reports you see are a logo for it on, on the screen. I encourage people just to go onto veeam.com and, and do a search for, for these reports, because you can get the historical reports as well.
And in fact, the, the beauty of the data here is the comparison year over year. It's not just what you learned from today's report, but what, what, how you compare it to, to the previous year, which I love.
These are reports that are, um, surveying usually between three and 4,000 globally. Um, enterprise type customers. They are non Veeam customers specifically. They are randomly selected customers. We pay for the research, but we're not trying to glean anything other than insights from the research.
So, I wanna encourage people to go and have a look at those. One of the things I like about, and I'm gonna, I just maybe click into a couple stats in a moment, but the thing that I like about it for MSPs, for sellers, for anybody who's trying to understand how to have more deep and meaningful conversations with customers, these, um, reports give ideas on what globally organizations are thinking about when it comes to data protection or when it comes to cloud. They give some really good starting points here.
And I, I kind of lead this discussion with like four, outta five, I think we have it. It's like 79% of organizations recognize they have a data protection problem. Mm-hmm. Now, they could already be existing in clients, they could be whatever, but the point is that they're acknowledging internally that they've actually got a need. And, and, and if I was trying to have a conversation with a prospect or a new customer, I'd be leading on this kind of information to say, well, well, what should I be talking to a prospect about, right?
If I know that four outta five people are having a data protection problem, or at least acknowledge that they have one, that's a great place to start. Um, so I, I lean on this, um, this, this information, these reports, um, quite a lot for, for good conversation starters, if nothing else.
Tony Stratton: Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. And before we drill down, Alan as well, I was wanna say, I've seen many MSPs leverage this information. I think it's phenomenal and I think it's meaningful data and provides, you know, insight for decision-making for our partners. I think it's awesome. So I've seen many of these stats and reports flashed up on slides with our MSPs.
Alan Warmington: I love it. And that's what it's for, right? It's not for us, it's for you. It's for everybody to go and consume. And, you know, we present it back to clients all the time, which is awesome. The first thing I want to show here, just around sort of, um, business continuity, DR is around site recovery methods. Um, I wasn't gonna read all of the points in the graph. There's a couple of things that, that, you know, you can see the trends or the changing trends from 22 to 23.
One is, you know, 60 odd per cent plan to recover on-premise in '22 versus 54 in '23. So we're now seeing these trends year over year on how changes in methodologies, changes in thinking that are happening on the client side, which is, which is interesting to note, you can go through and people will spend time looking at the graph on the right.
I won't go through it all, but, but what I see is, um, a couple of salient points. One is, it scares me a little bit, Tony, and then we're gonna talk about this a bit more today, but only 7% plan to recover cloud-hosted services from cloud-based replicas. I know, and it's the first time we see the word replica used in the whole chart. Everything else is recovering from backups.
Now it doesn't scare me per se, um, but it does tell me that there might be some, uh, maybe expertise or some planning that's missing from organizations. And, and when I go back to that four outta five companies recognize they've got an, to me, this is kind of a, a, a big issue that people are, I don't have a problem with people restoring for backups. I, I have a problem if that's the only way they plan to restore in the case of an incident.
So I think that's probably worth, worth talking about a little bit. Did you have any thoughts on that, Tony?
Tony Stratton: Look, I, I agree. I think, and that's something we come across all the time, Alan, is, you know, partners come back and say, oh, we haven't been hit, we haven't had, you know, we haven't had, uh, an event that's needed to pull back data quickly. Um, so, you know, we'll, we'll just rely on just the backups and it's, we come across it all the time and, and it's, it's an education process.
Once we go into that path of the benefits of DR as a service versus backups, I mean, backups are critical, don't get me wrong. Right? And you need to have multiple backups as well.
That's absolutely best practice. Sure. But I think it's really, really important to understand what is the actual impact of downtime. We'll talk more about this in the coming slides, which is really important. But, you're absolutely right. And it's, it's concerning, but those discussions are starting to take place.
I think with everything that's happening in the world, more and more partners and certainly customers are coming back and saying, okay, tell us about DRaaS and what it will do for us.
Alan Warmington: The thing, the other thing we gleaned from this slide too, by the way, is that customers are certainly not afraid to back up into the cloud.
So there's, there's no fear or lack of security or whatever. And so, so that's great, right? I think we've kind of the, the first half of the battle is there from a drought perspective. Exactly.
So that's really cool. And, and the other thing too, I haven't put on this slide, but, but maybe to wrap around it a little bit is, you know, from the reports that I'm referring to, data that everyone can find from these reports, only 18% of organizations have an orchestrated workflow for dr, right, for failover, 50% odd, 52% rely on some scripts, uh, maybe they've got some predefined scripts, which is fine.
It's good. Certainly better than, than not having <laugh> having something.
But 30% are relying on manually reconfiguring connectivity during some form of event. And so you start to build a bit of a, okay, really, are organizations suffering here at all? We don't know. Um, but are they, are they planning effectively? And then you've got the, the overarching, um, I think issue that insurance companies now want to see that you've got these plans, they want to know that you've got DR in place, they wanna see your DR plans, they wanna see maybe a, a successful failover as part of your insurance policy.
So you, you've got bigger issues to think about, um, when, when determining your data protection strategies. So there's a bit to bit to, to digest.
There's a really good point. Um, yeah, yeah. I might, I might go to the next one. Um, yep, go for it, Tony, real quick, and, and probably this is more around what I think are the drivers for DR.
If we look at the previous slide as being the reasons why, you know, when I, I referred to the replica thing there, um, maybe there's complexity, maybe there's lack of expertise, right? And that's what I think customers are leading on now, when they're looking for a DR as a service type solution. The, there is a broad variety of justifications or reasons why clients are, are looking at it or choosing it.
But the main things stand out, right? I'm not gonna go through the graph on the right, but you, you can kind of see where 30% of organizations have, have, have highlighted one thing and then 12% have said this is their number one reason. It comes down to expertise in planning, right? Um, and, and the big one always, and we see this when we, we talk with MSPs, the MSPs on the call will definitely know this, it's lack of time, lack of resource, and sometimes lack of expertise or availability of expertise that customers are, are suffering with.
And that's why they, that's why they go to an MSP anyway, cuz they're looking for experience and expertise. Ip, it's often what they're paying for, right? Um, but drs complicated, it certainly appears to be complicated. And so my reluctance behind putting together a really, really effective DR plan might be because I don't, I dunno enough about it or I don't have the expertise to consider it properly.
I think that's why there's a strong, a strong interest or at least a strong desire for, for consumers to go back to their MSP and say, look, next step, fix my problem. You guys are the experts. Come, come help me out. Um, and Tony, it's probably incumbent on you and I to make sure that our MSPs have that IP and have simple accessible solutions to go and provide to their customers that aren't burdening them with having to do tons of research, tons of understanding, tons of training to go and implement these solutions. A
Tony Stratton: Hundred percent. A hundred percent. And there's so many critical components as well.
I mean, the networking typically is one of the most challenging areas of, of any DR solution. So having those internal resources, and you know what I'm seeing MSPs do, certainly the ones that try and do it themselves and find out that, you know, for a number of reasons, and again, we'll talk about this in more detail shortly, but I think what's really important is, you know, you're pulling off some of your essential resources you have internally to do tasks.
They may not be that skilled in as well, is what I'm starting to see. And then running into further problems and then reaching out to the likes of a pro to help them.
So, you touched on some really good points here. A and I think they're all key factors. And when you look at this line down here of all those types of things, like, you know, improving SLAs and the cost efficiency and resource sharing, freeing up internal re these are all things that we take care of, which is really
Alan Warmington: Important. But to be fair, technology pieces, that, that's the, that's the thing you expect to see, right? You expect people to say, oh, you know, I I, I'm looking at drags because the tech, we don't have the technology internally, but it's actually people Exactly. People's problem, right?
That's the big gap that MSPs feel is kind of lack of expertise, lack of people, lack of capacity, definitely.
But I actually think the drive towards that is, is shifting. We saw great demand on, you know, people struggling to find people, organizations couldn't retain talent, couldn't hire talent, you know? Yes.
And, MSPs already have the skills, right? So, um, and, and where they don't, that's where they leverage you guys, right? So I, I think there's a, a good opportunity here. We know the market's trying to consume it, we know the reasons why the market's trying to consume it, which is awesome.
Now it's kinda like, well, how do we ensure that customers wanna prioritize DR as a function of their data protection strategy? And that's probably, I suppose, leading to the next bit, right, on the opportunity for MSPs.
Tony Stratton: Such a great slide. And I've seen so many partners, you know, leverage it. So, um, for those of you on the call that don't have it, please reach out to us and we'll make sure you have this information as well, so you can use it. But very key points.
I know customers look at that and go, yep, that's exactly us. So that's really cool. Okay, great. So, um, you know, DR is the main opportunity as we're talking about in the age of ransomware.
I mean, key examples in the press that we've all heard about recently, you know, the attacks that cause data leakage, productivity, brand damage, huge amounts of financial impact. I mean, we all hear about Latitude Group holdings, and we've heard about Optus and we've heard about Woolworths and Medibank, and these are all the ones you hear about the media.
And this obviously causes a bit of angst and, you know, nervousness within our customer base, but there are thousands we don't hear about when we're talking to many MSPs on a daily basis.
Alan, you know, they're telling us, yeah, we've had a, we've had an impact or, you know, we had something happen internally with our environment. We know of a customer, we know of a family member, it's everywhere. You know what I mean?
It's not just the very large companies that get the media attention. It's, it's so prevalent and it's so broad these days that even security vendors, I've been to a number of sessions and security vendors are talking to MSPs saying to them that, yes, look, you need to have the best line defense, but still you're at risk. It still could happen, right?
So it brings it back to the critical nature of, of backups and DR as a service to have that in the event something happens.
Alan Warmington: Look, Veeam doesn't profess to be a security company. I think you've got to protect the front door, you know, build your moat, do all those sort of things as a customer, but you know, you have insurance for a reason. And I kind of look at DR and backups as a form of insurance.
Certainly my issue I think for Australia is, we don't have the strongest governance and policy governing the types of data that our customers would hold for their customers, right?
Tony Stratton: Agree.
Alan Warmington: Yeah. And, and so it's a rich field. Australia's a very rich target for ransomware.
You've seen that, obviously we've seen that, if you look at it graphically, the number of incidents that have unreported and reported, we know it's there.
But the, the, the number of attacks, whether they're successful or not, the number of attacks is exploding. Um, absolutely. And that's the problem. And then you've got the, the bigger thing to Tony, which we, we haven't spent a lot of time talking about, I think offline is with the, with the, um, the advent of, of ai, the actual phish attacks, the, the level of creativity, but the, the, the level of, um, sophistication types, yeah.
The sophistication is improving significantly, and you can use AI to generate some pretty phenomenal phish attacks.
Now, I shouldn't be laughing because I I get them every day. I know you all do too. So it's only a question of time, right? That's probably the main thing.
Tony Stratton: Absolutely. Exactly right.
So I think, you know, the, the whole, the downtime impact is really, really key. And that's the question we need to be asking our customers is that, you know, what are, what are the impacts of downtime?
So interestingly enough, downtime can affect many facets of your business, right? The costs accumulate from loss of revenue, loss of employee productivity, damage to your reputation.
I mean, all these, some of things are hidden costs as well. But, uh, if you're an IT professional, working for a SMB business, downtime, data loss can have catastrophic consequences, right? We all know about 'em.
The interesting thing that I wanna touch on, um, and then, you know, we'll, we'll focus more on this information as well just before we move on, is that the number one cause of downtime is actually accidental human error.
Which is really key, Alan, right? It's like, it's not always malicious, it's not always, a hacker from overseas. It can be just a simple human error causes downtime and has a significant impact on your business, right?
Alan Warmington: Of course, accidental deletion is the number one reason for recovering from a backup. That is absolutely a thing.
Tony Stratton: Correct. So, yeah. Correct. Yeah. So cyber attack system failures, obviously software failures, natural disasters, they're all the things, even though we don't get hurricanes and tornadoes, we still obviously get fires and floods and outages and whatever else. So they're all really key things, uh, that we talk about to our customers. And, you know, what is that actual impact downtown?
How much is it gonna cost you to be down for a few days? And that gets back to our earlier conversations as well as, you know, is backup good enough? You know what I mean?
Will that do your job? Yeah. Because you've gotta pull the data back. There's limitations around that too. Sometimes you've gotta have kit available to spin up, you've gotta be able to reinstall everything. It can take days, weeks, whatever. Is that something you can afford to do, Mr. Customer, you know, really, really key.
This is a really interesting one I wanna talk to you about as well, Alan. You know, one of the main challenges MSPs face with DR, and I know this is gonna resonate with everybody on the call, right? Because often do we do it ourselves, you know, do we outsource it? Do we go to a cloud provider?
Do we let you just take care of all of it, you know, all the moving parts or, you know, what's it gonna be if we take it on ourselves, right?
So here's some really key things that we can both talk about, you know, the inability to scale, we all know about the supply chain and how hard it is to add more kit and, you know, put on more resources and all that sort of stuff. So I see that as being something which is a real challenge for many MSPs wanting to do it themselves.
Alan Warmington: Yeah. I I think it's the, almost the barrier to entry, isn't it?
If you're not running DR as a service today, that that is something you've built yourselves, um, it, it's probably hard to get started, right? There's, you need enough scale to, for the economies to, to make sense.
I'm just certainly not critical of, of partners that wanna take on the burden of, of doing this. If that's, if it's something that, you know, is core to their business, operating infrastructure, those things, no, no problem. Right?
But there's certainly many times where either it's the speed to deployment or there is maybe, yeah, maybe issues accessing infrastructure, whatever it is.
Sometimes there's value in, Hey, is there a way I can do it quicker? Um, and quicker isn't, isn't always better, but some, sometimes it's just the right way. And then, and then you've gotta think about your margins and all the bits and pieces you've got to, to wrap around it.
You know, everything we do has got to be profitable. Particularly as you're signing agreements with your customers, it could be 2, 3, 4, 5 years. It's like, you might be happy to take a little bit of a hit here and there, but when you're talking over four or five years and you've got a margin problem that you don't wanna keep up with for that long.
So I certainly think you get value in scale, and if you don't have scale already, that's, that's maybe an issue.
Tony Stratton: Yeah. Correct. And I, and I think that's, that's the key too.
I've seen so many examples right across Australia and New Zealand, and even throughout apac, where, you know, partners have made a significant investment and they're paying a lot of money to keep the lights on with their DR solution, and they've gotta get to a certain break-even point before it becomes profitable.
And so, you know, the pressure's on really, because the first handful of customers probably are lucky if you just eat break even, you know what I mean? So that's really key. So that's a really good point to raise, mate, the security and compliance. Wow.
You know, that's, that can be a very costly exercise as well. And if you have customers that have specific compliance and framework, you know, that they have to adhere to, um, some of these, they take a long time, you put a lot of resources off your team to, to get them done. And, you know, is it worth it for the partner?
I mean, that's, that's what they're looking at.
Alan Warmington: Yeah. Agree. Yeah.
Tony Stratton: Yeah. Very, very cool. So if we look at how can MSPs overcome these challenges in 2023?
I guess that's where we come in really as, certainly as a partnership as well. Very, very keen to talk about prox in general. Uh, for those of you on the call that, uh, obviously know who, who Prox is already, that's great. But for those of you who don't know, we have an in-house, secure console that we call Hive.
The key thing is here, and I, one thing I wanna touch on, Alan, is that we used to be in MSP, I think many, many years ago when we started. So we understand the needs and requirements. We understand what MSPs need, right?
To easily procure, deploy, and manage, uh, for their customers. We know MSPs want to simply make these processes very, very easy with services such as DRaaS and BaaS.
So bringing them all together under a single pane of glass makes it a lot easier for them to go to market and take care of all the things that we've talked about in today's session, right?
So being able to manage all your resources, whether it be on-prem or in the cloud, because we also have some in-house tools as well that we've developed, which are free for MSPs. We call 'em Scout.
We've also got Scout, It makes it simple for turnkey solutions to enable DRs for customers. Very, very simple. You've obviously come across Hive yourself, Alan, and you've seen that you've had feedback from partners.
Alan Warmington: I have, I, this is the cleverness, right? Actually probably before I talk about that is the key thing for me. I think partners working with other partners, you know, there's always, there's sometimes a feeling of what I'd rather be doing with myself or whatever the value in Probax for me is that you are 100% channel focused.
You're not out there trying to bill clients directly. You've got no interest in that.
You know, you are here for them, you are here for MSPs. And to be fair, that's probably a little gap that Veeam has that that product feels pretty nicely. Which is why I see so much value.
I know we're talking about DR today, but it's not limited to DR, right. There's a whole bunch of stuff wrapped around what Veeam provides that you then scale and bring value to our ecosystem. So that part I love.
Why don't you tell us a little bit around Hive?
Tony Stratton: Well, I mean, you know, it's, it's an integrated solution that has all of the things that we offer to the customers. If it's, you know, DR as a service, if it's backup as a service, M365 backup. Even other areas such as object storage as well.
All of this is integrated into the Hive platform. This is something we've built in-house, developed from the ground up, where, where the idea and concept came from.
Our founder, Kev, many, many years ago as an MSP, as wonderful and as the technology is with Veeam, it wasn't really MSP friendly, right? It's a phenomenal backup. I mean, you, you're globally number one, so I'm not gonna, you know, wave the, the Veeam flag. I don't need to, it's a phenomenal product, and it's certainly the best in the market, but, it wasn't as easy to use for MSPs.
We didn't feel it was as MSP friendly as it could have been.
So he started developing a few things to make it easier for himself internally as an MSP. And then we thought, you know what, this is something other MSPs could use. And then we started talking to the market and, uh, understanding that they were having the same challenges kind of morphed into a VCSP.
So we've now become a provider, and we basically live and breathe for MSP.
So everything we do from the ground up, everything we add as far as, you know, our whole development team in-house, we develop purely for MSPs, which is very, very cool.
So a lot of them that we talk to, and we have presentations every single day, that's what fills the gap, right? And that comes back to the better together story.
Alan Warmington: Curious. I mean, I really see you guys as a as a vendor, right? Rather than a VCSP in Veeam speak, right?
It's as a global vendor that happens to leverage Veeam technology, you do lots of other things too that have nothing to do with Veeam.
So, that's really the broader value that you bring to MPS really in this space.
Tony Stratton: Yeah. And there's so many things to do. I mean, you know, it's, it's a much broader presentation going into a lot more detail about product specific, but even the fact that we know we support both Hyper V and VMware and those types of things, that's pretty light on in the market.
You know, most of them are VMware, but we also have V Hyper V and VMware integrated into the platform all under the one pane of glass.
And, you know, we are seeing a lot more of that now. We're seeing Hyper V becoming part of organizations.
So we have a little bit of Hyper V over here, but the rest is VMware. So do you wanna work with two separate providers? One to look after the HyperV side and one to look after the VMware side, so we can do it all collectively under the one pane of glass, which is really cool.
So some of the high benefits to dig into deeper, I think, which is really, really cool. Full management of control of your on-premise cloud and SaaS workloads, really, Alan, whether it's, uh, cloud backup, like I said, the 365 archival storage, you have full control.
So the MSP has full control over their customers' environments, enterprise-grade security, automation, monitoring and reporting, immediate provisioning of Veeam licensing. That's really key too, right?
Just the ability, and you'll see how easy it's shortly.
ConnectWise integration as well. Streamlining billing. It's incredible how many MSPs I talk to, Alan, and the sales teams talk to where they say, we really wanna make billing easy. You know what I mean?
We just wanna provide and procure all these services, but we just wanna be able to just invoice our clients and move on to the next thing. <laugh>.
Alan Warmington: To be honest with you, Tony, I think it's, it's one of those areas, billing, that, that us vendors don't often realize how complicated that is as an issue.
But also how important it is to figure out what to bill the client and what for.
I know MSPs spent a lot of time trying to figure that out. So yeah, it's phenomenal.
You have those integrations with ConnectWise. I know that's very, very popular, widely used, certainly in ANZ. Absolutely.
Tony Stratton: Yeah. And I think that's, again, as we keep developing and growing, we add further integration with more tools.
But talking to the MSPs based locally, ConnectWise was the most, most popular.
So that's why we went with that one first cab off the rank. So yeah, this is just a great visual slide. Just to finish off on Hive, I know we talked a lot about Hive, and that really is a key differentiator in the market and why Veeam and Probax are better together.
But there you go. That's how easy it is, right? Just out of all those options down the side, select licenses, select the license type that you want, put in the quantity download instantly, it's that easy. Really, really simple and easy to use.
So there's a really quick flash demo, I guess you could say of Hive, of how easy this to procure licenses.
And then on the back of that too, for the MSPs, we can take care of all the reporting and information back to Veeam while you still maintain your status and, and your level with Veeam as well.
Really a value add that, that Probax offers, which is great. I love this slide and I also talk a lot about it to partners when we do presentations as well.
We make it available to all MSPs. What this really highlights here, Alan, is uh, how Provax and Veeam is better together. United, we take complex and granular solutions and make it easy for our partners.
A couple of key differentiators here you'll see on the slide here, for example, is how easy the automated failback process is within Hive and within Provax with Veeam back end engine, you know, compared to the likes of the Datos, the storage crafts, the enables the arons, which I get a lot of feedback on a daily basis that MSPs tell me the failback is quite a manual process and creates challenges in itself.
So the fact that this is purely automated with the tools that we've built for our MSPs just shows you how we differentiate, you know, as a partnership. Um, we also see contracts as well.
There's a, there's a number of things here which shows the benefits of the provac solution with Veeam. But, um, you know, even contracts in the onboarding process for some of some of these other players in the market, they have a single contract per customer. So again, there's additional admin, additional overheads, you know, whereas, and I guess that really comes across as a direct type strategy more so than a channel strategy, because we have one partner contract with our MSPs, and that's it.
Again, it's the admin, it's the billing, it's the complexity of the solutions simplified. I guess that's really the key messaging here today, is how we are taking all of that and making it a lot easier. Don't have a contract and details and don't have compliance and everything for every single contract that you do with your provider, right? It's one thing you as an MSP dealing with your customers, but to have, to have that overlay of all the additional effort and time that you need with your provider, just, it, it doesn't make sense to me.
Alan Warmington: I often think that's a big thing too, that we vendors often don't realize is, is, you know, you're talking about time to respond to a, you know, a client request or build a proposal, whatever it is, knowing what your pricing is every day makes very, very simple.
Not having to wait for maybe there's a special bid from the vendor or something. All those things are good. I mean, all vendors have it, but you know, from a, from a service provider perspective, being able to go into a client knowing what your cost will be. Yeah. Right? Standardize it simple. You've put all that under one agreement.
And yes, it is tiering of course, with growth, of course. Exactly. But it does make it easy, um, kind of knowing what my fixed cost will be going into a conversation and it speeds up then the, the, the time it would take for me to respond back to a, to a client, right? As an MSP, I think that's really important.
Tony Stratton: That's right. And I mean, with Probax, you can set your own quotas as well, which is really important.
So there are a lot of, uh, of these providers that are on the screen here that, you know, you, you're kind of locked in to a particular volume of contract and that it, it's an ever-changing, um, you know, landscape as we talked about with customers that, you know, they might reduce in size, there could be something that happens, which is completely outta their control, they lose half their workforce, they lose a department, whatever it might be.
So you need to scale back slightly. And, you know, having that flexibility where you can go up and down and not be locked in and try and find quickly somewhere else, so you start losing money, that's really key as well. So I think, um, you know, that that's, that's an absolute differentiator for us as a business and Veeam accommodates that beautifully.
Alan Warmington: Yeah, sure. Very cool.
Tony Stratton: Excellent. So, um, well, what have we got today? This is really exciting.
So, um, we've made this available as an offer for attendees and, and it's in partnership with Veeam that is, of course.
So we're offering this for a limited time only until the end of the month where Probax, if you sign up by the end of May, you'll get gold-level discount pricing.
So again, gets back to what you just touched on, you know, competitive pricing, discounts, no minimum monthly spend, as well as 25% off discount for three months. So not only do you have a phenomenal topic to take back to your customers, because everybody's talking about cybersecurity, data protection, DRaaS, offsite backups, you've got this, you've got this opportunity now to go back with a very compelling offer as well. And, um, you know, yeah, I think, I think it's, I think it's great that we can offer that to our, to our partners that go back and then, uh, you know, leverage these, um, these very topical discussions.
Alan Warmington: I love it. You've got a call to action, which is wonderful. Um, but, but if anything, it's a reason to go put some urgency behind having a discussion that, that, that, you know, that clients are trying to have or, or, or maybe considering, and, and MSPs now can, can have a reason to go talk about it and make it a priority in discussions with their clients.
Tony Stratton: Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. And I think also as well, um, you know, with our coverage right across Australia, being locally based, one of the things that we do very effectively, cuz we are a hundred percent channel, I know you touched on that, and that's really, really important too.
We do not compete at all with our partners. I think it's really important to know you have skills that you can leverage, whether it's our technical, uh, service desk team or, you know, our sales who are also technically competent as well, to, to attend these sessions to help you with joint presentations as a partner.
You know, often we bring in Veeam as well. So you have Probax, Veeam, and the MSP doing joint presentations to customers. It's a very powerful message of how complementary we are working together.
So that's something that I would invite any of the MSPs on the call that leverage us, leverage us as an extension to your sales force. Let us help you close some of these deals as well, which is really, really cool.
I think we're open now for Q&A with the attendees so we can address some of the questions. I know there have been some that have been coming through as we were talking there, Alan, so I can...
Alan Warmington: Yeah, yeah, why don't you go to the first one then, while you are, while you're looking that up, I'll ask, maybe just open it to the floor, if there's any of the attendees that have a burning question, drop it in the Q&A at the bottom of your Zoom login there, you'll see a Q&A button. Any other insights you wanna share, we're open to discussion on those things too.
Tony Stratton: Absolutely. Cool. Yep. Cool. Alright. T
he first one I've got here, does Probax sell directly to end users? Will Probax and Veeam ever compete with my MSP and try to go direct like some of the other vendors do?
No, absolutely touched on that as well. So in actual fact, we have a, we have extensive deal registration process, but, let us know who you're talking to.
Of course that helps because sometimes you do get, you're doing all the great work and you do get customers going out to websites and checking a few things, and they might come across as a lead. So I wanna make sure it goes back to you.
But no, we do not sell directly. We sell 100% through the channel, which is really important. Love it. Yep. Cool. Love that.
We've looked at DRaaS offerings before, but the pricing models were somewhat complex and hard to predict.
How does the pricing structure for Second Colony DRaaS work?
So with us, we make it very simple. It's simply a once-off setup fee.
Then we just need how much flash storage, how many ips, right? So typically we, it's typically one, but I mean, it can vary from, you know, environments, but typically one ip and then it's just the Veeam license per VM, which is the CloudNet replication license.
So all we need is those three items, and then we can very, very simply price it up for you.
So again, try to make it all-inclusive. Uh, very, very flexible. I haven't come across an environment where we can't help as well. I guess it comes back to that Hyper V and VMware types environment, but, um, we really simplify the process and we've even got some nice, nice to easy, easy to read battle cards that, um, your sellers can leverage. So, um, let us know. But those three, three easy things is,
Alan Warmington: Let, let me maybe dovetail a question to that one cause it was a good one. But, um, outside of say, pricing structures, those things just around, helping define a solution for, for an MSP who's, who's having trouble figuring out what to, what to position. Love it. Is that something you guys can assist with?
Tony Stratton: Absolutely. Yeah. The consulting side, I mean, I touched on it during, uh, you know, during our chat, Alan, the, uh, the Vanguards as well, you know, the in-house expertise that we bring to the table. They've had hundreds and hundreds of DRaaS, you know, over the years as well. I mean, beyond being with Probax for many years, they've, you know, got a very extensive background of DR as a service and disaster recovery in general.
So, you know, leverage that Intel, leverage those skills. They've got, you know, the phenomenal questions that they ask and just really get customers thinking. And it also gives them peace of mind that, um, you know what, this is what I wanna do. This is the path I wanna go down to. So absolutely, you know, it's, it's, it's part of the service that we offer. So definitely leverage our skills that we can offer.
I love that. Great, great, great point to raise. Thank you. Very cool.
What RTO and RPOs, so recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives. Uh, you often hear that around the DR terminology. So, you know, what can Probax and Veeam provide?
It's down to minutes, which is just incredible, right?
When you look at that really, I guess, drills down on backup versus DR, having an offsite backup, how quickly can you get the data back up and running?
Whereas, in a DR environment, if the need is there, and again, this gets back to the qualification process of what's important, how long can you be down for? How much data can you lose? These are all key things we need to determine with that customer as we, as we map it out and have that, you know, uh, consultant type approach.
So that's really, really important. But we can have you back up and running within minutes.
Alan Warmington: I think that's, that's worth noting, Tony. A significant change with Veeam in the release of v12, which was only a couple of months ago, was CDP being introduced into the product now at scale.
So you've got that continuous data protection, not now not done through VM snapshot, but via journaling. It's like in through the IO filter. So you do have certainly for VMware workloads, you've really got sort of CDP down to seconds and minutes replication rather than sort of daily or hourly type thing. Which is awesome.
Tony Stratton: Okay, very cool. Uh, question comes through from Tim as well just on the chat.
So thanks for the question. Tim. We have a few education customers. Are they currently pricing models, tiers for these customers?
Yes, there is for DRaaS and BaaS products. So we do additional discounts for education.
We also look at government. We also have NFP, so come and talk to us about that. Let us know. We can even do joint campaigns as well if you are very strong in the education sector and vertical.
It's not uncommon for us to do a joint campaign that we can work with our partners as well and go after a specific vertical. So, great question. But yeah, we can certainly help you with that.
Another one's come through as well. I need to address solutions that is local to my MSP and customers. Is second currently available in multiple regions and locations?
Great question. Uh, yes, it is actually in Australia alone, we have multiple DCs that we work with. I think we're one of the only ones that has on the eastern seaboard as well as Western ones that I've come across.
But, we've got a DC availability in Perth, we've got 'em in Sydney, Melbourne, and then I've across the globe, in addition to having tier three and tier four level DCs that we work with, right, that tick all those compliance boxes in addition to what we've got in-house as well.
We also partner with the hyperscalers, right? So that opens up a huge amount of opportunity to almost a hundred of those centers globally. So we can spin up pretty much anywhere in the globe really quickly, especially if you want 365 backup and some of those solutions.
Very, very simple. And that's, that's fantastic and strategic. If you have a customer that also has an office in, you know, Singapore or London or Germany or you know, anywhere in the us so let us know.
But, um, we have access to those data centers as well, as well as we have more than most others that I know in region in Australia. So, great question.
One of the last ones I've got here, Alan, it says here, can I recover my customer sites using Veeam Cloud Connect backups? Why should I invest in DRaaS?
I think we can both answer that pretty quickly. It comes back to is good enough, good enough? You know what I mean?
Like, they have the offsite backups, uh, but when you work it out, how long's it gonna take to pull that data back?
How long is it gonna take to get back up and running? Can you be down for a week or two weeks? Or what if, you know, pulling some of those, if you're using a seating device, for example, and what if there's some issues there?
I just think it comes back to the cost of downtime, which is really one of the key theme messages we're trying to get across, is that's some of the questions that you really need to ask is, can you really afford to be offline for, for, for a lengthy period of time? And just, just on that as well, it's amazing how many customers say to me, I don't mind if I don't have email for one or two days. <laugh>
Alan Warmington: Yeah, I'm, I'm mine <laugh>.
Tony Stratton: You know what I mean? Like, there's so many we talk to and say, oh, you know, if it's, if we're down for two or three days, we'll be okay.
Alan Warmington: There might be, there might be, there might be days Tony when I wish I didn't have email for. So my, uh, my thought pattern is, is similar.
I think there's certain times when recovering from a backup, like an instant VM recovery from a backup makes sense. Yes. Um, but therefore that if that's the only tool you've got in your back pocket, then that's what you've gotta default to. And I actually think, um, not to be critical of VM on this one, but you know, our instant VM recovery is very good, right? Yeah.
So sometimes it may be enough, uh, and, and it may be, it may be for many, for many customers, um, but you don't have, you don't have that next tool, which is, which is a full replica that's ready to power on, right? And that's the difference between restoring from a backup, depending where you're restoring tool of course.
Um, but also having a, you've got a, you've got a replica of your machine on standby, ready to power on, you're ready to go. Yeah. And that's your, your difference in downtime, your difference in criticality of data, um, how, how much you can afford to lose in the meantime while things are down. Um, all those things are a consideration.
I expect there'll be circumstances where a client will say, I just need to replicate this portion of my environment, my critical thing. Yes, I wanna be on a failover. And very often it's a single, or we call it a partial failover, but it's a single VM or a couple of VMs that, that fall over.
Not there's a fire in my building right, where I need to fail over everything. But, you know, having the option to do both is, uh, a, a strong, I think it's a strong messaging market, but it's, it's, it's certainly something I think customers are looking for now. Right. Agreed. Which is the reason why it's important.
Tony Stratton: What I love the fact that you said as well, um, Alan, is that, you know, the, the customers are more open now or certainly more comfortable with putting backups in the cloud.
You know, a few years ago that was, that was quite different. It was, you know, there was obviously data security concerns, there was data sovereignty concerns, there was latency concerns. Um, I've seen the uptake of 365 backup and I've seen the uptake of offsite backups with vCloud Connect.
That's just, that seems to be a no-brainer these days, right? So I think those discussions now, and many of those customers that have offsite backups, they're just looking at DRS as well as another option. Cause is easy, you know,
Alan Warmington: It makes sense, but I mean, let's not discount the fact that there are plenty of people not doing offsite backup either, right? So there, there's a lot to talk to customers about, and it's ensuring, you know, for, for us, and I haven't talk about this, you know, quite publicly, is, you know, Vema will get, get excited when a new customer joins Veeam. Fantastic.
But that actually might not be at the end of the journey, even if it's not generating revenue for Veeam later through license or anything else. Like, I don't, I don't care whether it does or doesn't. I think if the customer's not protected appropriately, it's not just cuz they're using our tools, but they're using the next thing, right?
It might be immutability, it might be offsite, it might be dr, it might be whatever. It's like, well, the journey's not finished from choosing a technology.
You've gotta implement it correctly and you've gotta bring on, you know, I certainly, I think it's important for MSPs because one, there absolutely are revenue streams involved behind it. The stickiness that goes invo involved in doing DR for a client is like that.
Client's never leaving you, as long as things work well, they're never leaving. Right? That's right.
But I think there's, DR is, it doesn't have to be expensive, but it's high value. It's certainly high value in the discussion you're having with your clients, and it, it certainly elevates you from someone who's managing an environment to someone who's critical in the operation of that business. I just think there's so much more value in it,
Tony Stratton: And there is absolutely, there's, there's a lot more. It's scaling and, and I I like what you said too, it's sticky as well. It, it's, it's a fantastic solution to offer your customers. I mean, you know, a as an M S P, when you get feedback from a customer saying that we, we were impacted for whatever reason, right? Whether it was an accidental deletion or a ransomware attack or, you know, hardware failure, whatever it was, and thanks to you, Mr. MSP, uh, we were back up and running in no time.
I mean, that's just, you know, that's, that's fantastic. So I think that's, um, uh, that goes without saying, you know, and it don't get me wrong, you know, there's margin involved and, you know, as part of the partnership and relationship and everything else, but to be able to help a customer, uh, you know, and get outta trouble, that's the, you know, that's, that's what it's all about. Right? Let,
Alan Warmington: Let's not forget about the panic that goes on if you get hit by ransomware or whatever the incident is. There's, there's an immediate panic. Yeah. Right? And then that panic gets moved from the client to the Ms. P, now it's the MSPs turn to panic.
You know, for me is how do I reduce the panic? It's, well, I have, I have, I have ds you know, I have whatever, whatever the tools I need to make the, the, the response that are incident, uh, efficient, effective, clean, operationally, whatever. Cause we know what happens with, you know, MSPs will overservice clients. They will drop everything to, to, to help out in a situation. Exactly.
Tony Stratton: Exactly.
Alan Warmington: But the question will be, well, how many things did you really need to drop to help out that, that single client in that single incident. Exactly. And if you can make the operation, the recovery, the, the back, getting business back to normal, smooth, then you've remove so much of the panic, right? Yep. This is like heart stopping stuff for, for a CTO who's been well, yeah,
Tony Stratton: Yeah. Protecting their number one asset, their data, you know? You're spot on. Hundred percent. Yeah. So I have no more further questions, uh, unless there's anything else you wanna add, Alan, before we, before we wind this up? Um,
Alan Warmington: No, I'm good to chat. I mean, this is a, a topic that's due to my heart. I'm not, you know, I'm not a technical expert, but I certainly see the value. And by the way, if, if partners and, and MSPs in the call are wondering the significance of this for Veeam, like this is absolutely one of the core, um, strategies in market today, is to be talking more around as a service offerings, DR.
So it won't just be MSPs running around town trying to, you know, trying to make sure that their clients are understanding the value of it, Veeam are doing it, Probax are doing it, you know, the market's doing it.
This will certainly be raising the profile of what's important to what we see organizations are, are saying is important to us, um, and focusing marketing efforts around that. So we, we hope that there'll be, you know, demand for, for everybody.
We hope that people will get it and, and wanna adopt solutions and therefore it's what's the best way to offer a solution? What's the quickest way to get my client sorted, right? Um, and if that's, that's with Probax, then amazing.
Tony Stratton: Brilliant. Really appreciate that, mate. Thank you.
Look, just in closing, I wanna thank everybody for your time today. Thank you for joining. I know we all have busy schedules, really appreciate it.
I'd like to thank you, Alan, as well, for joining us, co-hosting and providing your insights as well, mate. Thank you as always. Um, and details and contacts will be sent out to everybody who attended, and for some of those that couldn't today as well, we'll send that out.
I'm sure you'll come across a DRaaS opportunity very, very soon. So please reach out to Probax and Veeam, we're here to help and make it easy for you. So thank you very much everyone.
Alan Warmington: Thanks Tony.
Tony Stratton: Thank you.
