Backup is your customer’s last line of defense—so you don’t want to make solution decisions purely based on price or your customer’s willingness to pay. At the same time, you want the flexibility to meet your customers’ evolving backup needs. And since it’s one of the most expensive solutions you’ll resell, you also want to ensure your customers are getting exactly what they need—not overspending or underspending—and you’re still making a profit.
The latest initiatives around the Kaseya Backup Suite—free hardware for Datto SIRIS, a new Backup Concierge Program, and Next Gen Endpoint Backup—are designed to meet those multifaceted needs of its MSP partners. And today, the company announced it has delivered on those programs and enhancements it announced last month at DattoCon in Miami.
Free Hardware For Datto SIRIS S5-X And S5-X4
The Datto SIRIS S5-X and S5-X4 appliances are now available with free hardware for any contract term, including month-to-month.
“A lot of MSPs feel like there’s some volatility in their customer base today,” Frank DeBenedetto, general manager, MSP Suite, Kaseya, tells MSP Success. “Some of the customers are getting acquired. The economy’s questionable. Some customers go out of business. So they don’t often want to commit for 3 years.”
In other cases, he says, MSPs may have plans to move a customer to the cloud, “which means they wouldn’t need the appliance anymore at some point, so maybe there’s an 8-month need.”
At the same time, he adds, this flexibility makes it easier for MSPs to get the right solution in place and not have to make decisions based around pricing. “So now they can offer something with confidence, which is Datto backup, and have an appliance on-site which, for a lot of our partners, is important to their disaster recovery efforts.”
The free hardware for month-to-month and one-year plans is just for the 2 TB and 4 TB models currently, but DeBenedetto says they will be evaluating extending that to other models, which he notes that partners are hopeful for. “If we see a spike in the number of free hardware on month to month and one-year [plans] then we’ll know that that was a good decision, and then we’ll consider extending it to other models.”
Kaseya Backup Concierge Program
As part of the Kaseya Backup Suite initiatives, the company also officially launched its new Backup Concierge Program, an effort that Kaseya has invested $10 million in. This purpose-built program taps the expertise of Datto staff to help MSPs ensure they are optimizing their profitability and supporting technical needs throughout the data protection journey for new and existing clients. In addition to an account manager, MSPs now get access to a dedicated backup solution architect, trained to help MSPs close more deals, as well as marketing assistance with pricing, packaging, and quoting.
“Backup is typically the most expensive service that [MSPs] will resell,” DeBenedetto says. “If it’s done wrong, your MSP won’t be profitable. Or if you have the wrong solution deployed down to your customers then backup won’t be available if necessary. So that Backup Concierge’s job is to make sure that we’re doing it right commercially and that we’re doing it right technically for the MSP.”
DeBenedetto says the program, which is free for Kaseya Datto backup customers, is rolling out now to about 300 MSP partners at a time. “By the first quarter of 2025, every MSP will have access to a Backup Concierge.”
Next Gen Endpoint Backup Available Now In Kaseya 365 Endpoint
Finally, Kaseya’s Next Gen Endpoint Backup is generally available now. This latest version offers better control, more flexibility and greater restore options—and still at a price point which makes it more profitable than any competitive solution on the market, according to the company.
DeBenedetto says MSPs will like the new version’s flexibility. “You now can take that endpoint backup and pair that with whatever other options are appropriate for your customer. So you have a single agent; if you want to pair it with a BCDR device, you can, if you want to add DraaS, disaster recovery in the cloud, you can. If you want to pay for additional resources, you can. You could pick and choose what kind of retention you want.”
This latest version also gives an MSP’s end users more restoration options, he says. “We’re going to give some of the power to an end user to be able to recover individual files or folders, to be able to look through all the versions that have been backed up, and then they could select it. So it takes some of the pressure off the MSP. And it gives some additional power and flexibility to the end user to be able to do some recovery.”
There are more disaster recovery options for the MSP too, he adds, “things like being able to restore right to Azure as well as be able to export to a multitude of other formats, to be able to spin up quickly and get the servers back online.”
Next Gen Endpoint Backup is available as a standalone SKU or a part of Kaseya 365 Endpoint. All net new Kaseya 365 Endpoint deployments will include the new Next Gen Endpoint, says DeBenedetto, adding that existing Kaseya 365 Endpoint customers will have an easy upgrade path.
The Takeaway For MSPs
“We’re evolving with the times,” DeBenedetto says about the Kaseya Backup Suite initiatives. “We’re trying to give a multitude of flexible options to the MSP, so that way they could back up anything, anywhere, at any time, and stay within our product family.”
DON’T MISS! For more on Kaseya initiatives, check out this exclusive interview with Jeff Johnson from MSP Success and Kaseya executives Michael DePalma and Jason Pryce. They dive into recent updates and tools that are empowering MSPs to enhance their security and profitability, including the new Kaseya 365 User.
