Hundreds of managed service providers will be gathering in Toronto, Canada this week for the 6th annual Asigra Partner Summit. For those of you who have never been to one of Asigra’s events, they are something to behold. What makes this event unique is not that the attendees are mostly MSPs (many conferences can also make that claim). The unique aspect of the Asigra event is that these are MSPs who also have a service vertical focus on storage and backup. This is a rare congregation of providers who both share a common business model as well as a service vertical.
“The Asigra Partner Summit is always an invaluable experience where attendees have the benefit of sharing experiences with other partners across the globe,” said Mark Saville, Managing Director, OnDemand Recovery. “This educational and networking event will have saved us considerable time in developing value added capabilities and support us in making the right decisions while navigating the customer environment.”
Some interesting announcements we are expecting from the event. First, I’ve heard that Asigra may be making changes to its pricing models. What those changes are and how they impact MSPs, we will provide analysis as we get word.
Second, Asigra appears to be making visible attempts to go higher into the enterprise market. This could mean big opportunities for MSPs with enterprise capabilities. But, what about the smaller MSPs? I believe Asigra can focus more on enterprise while still playing an integral role with smaller MSPs by leveraging “master MSPs” like LiveBackup, a prominent MSP in Australia and one of Asigra’s largest partners in the country.
We will be posting live updates from the conference as we get them so be sure and check back frequently!
Day Two
Cloud to Cloud Backup – Asigra today announced support for Google Apps, Salesforce, and many other popular cloud applications. What does this mean for MSPs? Now, MSPs can play an even more important role with their customers by not just offering public cloud applications (which tend to minimize the importance of MSPs) but actually providing valuable backup and redundancy solutions around those popular public cloud applications.
“There were 50 million business people provisioned in whole or part with office systems capabilities from the cloud at the start of 2013. Those 50 million are only 8% of the overall universe of office system users. The number of cloud-provisioned users will grow 28.5% a year to 695 million users by 2022 (and constitute 60% of the larger user universe that will exist by then). We’re expecting cloud-provisioned users to constitute 33% of the enterprise universe in 2017,” said Tom Austin, Senior Analyst, Gartner. A major acceleration toward cloud office systems (including email) will begin by 1H15, with “early majority” adopters migrating in earnest and “late majority” adopters beginning this move by 2017.”
What might be even more important to the MSPs, is Asigra’s underlying motive in announcing this new offering. In the press release headline Asigra believes that cloud provisioned users will represent 33% of the enterprise by 2017 (statistic from Gartner). While this may not seem much of a prognostication, it does represent a value statement from Asigra that its future, and by extension the future of its partner MSPs, that the enterprise is where the action is.
In an odd way, new features like cloud to cloud backup may be a back door for many MSPs to start penetrating the enterprise marketplace. Particularly, for some of the Asigra partners who are themselves specialists in storage, being able to deliver cloud to cloud backup for larger customer environments is precisely what is needed to start selling into enterprise accounts that would have previously thought such MSPs to be too small or invaluable.
Make no mistake, Asigra wants to push heavily into the enterprise and larger markets, and it wants its MSPs to help lead that push.