Datto Inc.‘s new networking solution is attracting buyers at a faster clip than even the company that makes it anticipated.
That’s according to Rob Rae, vice president of business development for the Norwalk, Conn.-based vendor.
“It’s been wildly successful,” he told ChannelPro in an interview at the CompTIA Annual Member Meeting, now underway in Chicago. “Sales have been well above forecast of what we actually initially expected.”
Introduced at the end of January, Datto Networking combines a router and unified threat management appliance designed by Datto itself with wireless access points and switches from Open Mesh Inc., a Lake Oswego, Ore.-based network hardware vendor now owned by Datto and operated as an independent subsidiary.
In an interview with ChannelPro last month, Datto CEO Austin McChord predicted that deployments of Datto Networking would come gradually in conjunction with the routine Wi-Fi upgrades most businesses perform every 3 to 5 years. Rae, however, says partners are rolling the new system out on a more rapid schedule, largely because its month-to-month, subscription-based pricing aligns more favorably with MSP business models than alternative products from hardware specialists.
“That is an awesome story that nobody in the networking side is telling,” he says. “That’s why we think we’ve got pretty big winner here.”
MSPs are adjusting more slowly, however, to the new global partner program Datto introduced 2 weeks ago, which bases tier assignments on how much monthly recurring revenue members generate. Datto’s previous channel program measured resellers by how many terabytes of cloud storage space they consumed, an approach that works well for BDR solutions but offers no recognition for networking sales. According to Rae, some partners weren’t clear on why they suddenly belonged to a new level in a changed program.
“As humans we’re averse to change and trying to understand something new,” he observes. “The initial reaction was very, very positive but you had a few partners that didn’t quite understand what had happened.”
Rae believes the old partner program, which he designed himself when he joined Datto in 2013, was due for a change.
“We hadn’t had any changes in our partner program in the last four years,” he says. “That also includes benefits to the partners. We didn’t actually really add any additional benefits in there.”
As a result, partners have been gradually receiving less and less incremental reward for their sales efforts.
“There was really no motivation or no reason for them to use the partner program, no incentive to go and sell more, and no benefit if they actually did sell more,” Rae says.
Helping partners acclimate themselves to the new program is one of Datto’s priorities for 2017, along with driving adoption of Datto Networking. Those tasks are likely to keep the company from entering any further market segments with products like that one or Datto Drive, the file sync and share solution that debuted last year, Rae says. Still, he adds, Datto never says never.
“As soon as vendors in a specific pocket take their eye off the channel, we’re ready to jump in,” Rae says.
