A Category 4 Is No Excuse For Downtime

Are you…

Frustrated with backup solutions that don’t quite work as advertised?

Looking for a complete line of backup solutions that you can profitably sell downmarket and upmarket?

100% certain you can serve your customers’ even if you get hit by an outage yourself?

Nick Benanti had enough!

The backup solutions he was sell- ing didn’t work right. And they were too time-consuming to manage.

It got to the point where he actually had to tell a lead referred to him by one of his backup vendors that he just didn’t think their product would do the job—because sometimes the backup would hang. Worse yet, it could take hours to figure out exactly what was causing the problem, because the system alerts were too vague to be of any help.

Then Benanti, solutions consultant for leading Philadelphia-area MSP Penn System Group, stumbled upon Datto. Miraculously, Datto’s solutions worked. They backed up the files they were supposed to back up. If there was a problem, Benanti got alerts that led him directly to the underlying issue. Just as important, Datto gave Benanti a complete line of backup solutions to fit every the needs and budgets of all kinds of prospects.

Time is Money

Benanti is an honest, practical man. He knows it doesn’t pay to sell a customer something they can’t use. He also knows it doesn’t pay to sell a customer something that will cost more in ongoing support than it’s worth.

That may be his top grievance against his previous backup vendors. “I can’t make any money if I’m spending hours trying to chase down the problem with a backup,” he explains. “And my customers sure don’t want to pay me to learn what’s wrong with the software I just sold them.”

“Backup solutions are only worth selling if they work, if you can price them right, and if you can get straight answers from the vendor. That’s why we sell Datto.”
Nick Benanti
Penn Systems Group

As an example, Benanti recalls the time he discovered a bug in one solution that wouldn’t back up any open Exchange mailbox above a certain size. “We’d get a message that the entire backup had failed,” he laments. “But it didn’t fail. There was just a problem with one open mailbox!”

Priced for the Market

Benanti also knows that backup can be a tough sell. Customers might admit that they need protection, but they often balk at spending money on a problem that they’re not sure they’ll ever have.

Datto makes it easy for Benanti to overcome these objections. He can sell virtual solutions to the growing number of small companies in his area that have minimal IT infrastructure—but that are extremely vulnerable to business interruption as a result of the power failures and severe weather than have become so common in eastern Pennsylvania. And for larger clients, he can deliver a hybrid solution that combines an on-site appliance with cloud storage. (See Diagram)

Just as important, Datto’s Time-Based Cloud Retention model lets him offer customers predictable pricing, while ensuring Penn Systems of predictable margins. “Customers don’t always really know what their data volume is going to be—and some can be less than forthcoming about what they are going to want to back up,” Benanti observes. “With Datto’s TBCR, you can handle unexpected volume while avoiding unproductive disputes over monthly charges.”

Proof by Example

Perhaps the strongest argument Benanti makes for Datto is his company’s own experience with an outage due to extreme weather. An ice storm knocked out power in the region for two days in February 2014*. Penn Systems’ customers needed a lot of help—but its own data center was off-line too.

Fortunately, Penn Systems had its critical customer data backed up in the cloud with Datto. The company’s technical staff quickly managed to get access to that data from their homes on their laptops. So using that data and their cellphones, they were able to quickly respond to customers and help them at least minimally restore business operations despite the outage.

“If you’re an MSP and you can’t keep your own business running in an emergency, you can’t expect your customers to trust you to help them,” he declares. “Thanks to Datto and a little smart planning, we didn’t have that problem—so our credibility soared.”