Altaro has added subscription pricing and multi-tenant administration to its virtual machine backup solution for SMBs.
Available to all enrollees in the Maltese vendor’s partner program and officially known as VM Backup for MSPs, the new offering is designed to make Altaro’s VM Backup product more attractive to MSPs as an option for protecting virtualized workloads. At present, MSPs comprise roughly 10 percent of Altaro’s 6,000-member worldwide channel, a quarter of which is based in North America.
VM Backup for MSPs lets MSPs and other partners who bill clients via recurring monthly fees pay for Altaro software the same way.
Subscriptions cost $5 per protected virtual machine per month, with a 10 VM minimum and no upfront fees. There are no single or multi-year contracts either, so partners can cancel their subscription at any time.
“If they want to leave after a week or a month they can do that,” says Altaro co-founder and vice president of sales and marketing Stephen Chetcuti Bonavita.
To make managing subscription-based deployments simpler, VM Backup for MSPs also includes an administration console providing centralized control over multiple end user accounts. Hosted in the cloud and available free of charge to all Altaro partners, the new tool supplements basic monitoring functionality with the ability to schedule backups, set retention policies, and use backup configuration templates to simplify new client setup. Partners can manage both subscription and perpetual VM Backup licenses through the portal as well.
Prior to today’s rollout, Altaro’s sole administrative tool was a system that had to be deployed and operated on-premises.
“It was a bit more cumbersome,” Chetcuti Bonavita says.
Altaro put VM Backup for MSPs into beta testing last September. 1,000 of the company’s partners are already using the new cloud management console to backup over 50,000 virtual machines for some 9,000 end users. 300 MSPs have signed up for subscription pricing since testing began as well. According to Chetcuti Bonavita, another 40 join them every month.
“It’s overshot our expectations of where we expected to be at this stage,” he says.
Altaro’s new MSP offering is an optional extension to the company’s existing partner program, rather than a new, parallel program.
Founded in 2009, Altaro currently has over 30,000 end user customers in 113 countries worldwide. The company is presently in the process of shifting from a mix of direct and through-partner sales to a channel-only model, and already conducts 100 percent of its sales through partners in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In North America, it presently does 70 percent of its business via resellers, up from 60 percent 2 months ago.
VM Backup, which supports both VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V workloads, is optimized for businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees. Altaro added inline deduplication, a new boot from backup feature, and support for Windows Server 2016 to the system in April. Several weeks ago, it quietly rolled out integration with ConnectWise Automate, the RMM platform formerly known as LabTech, as well.
Altaro plans to allow users to save backups in Microsoft Azure public cloud starting next month. That feature is currently in beta testing.
