Cloud backup vendor Intronis kicked off what it says will be a very busy year for updates, introducing its Spring ’14 edition that includes new support for image backups, and expands its ability to back up virtualized IT assets.

With the launch, Intronis is making the case for solution providers being able to streamline their disaster recovery offerings around the company’s products and services, particularly as it moves out of folder backup and storage, and into full system protection with the addition of physical imaging.

“This is transformative. It takes us into a completely different arena,” said Chuck DeLouis, vice president of product management at Intronis.

With the addition of physical imaging, enabled in Intronis with a “small license fee” for backing up to local storage, and the standard per gigabyte rate for cloud backup, DeLouis said the mindset of the product switches from selecting which files and folder to protect on a given system, to simply backing up the whole system. The simplicity of this approach is popular with SMBs, and the ability to do so locally, and to have a disk overnighted for regular scheduled backups, resonates particularly well with small businesses without high-bandwidth connections.

In a recent release, Intronis added support for backing up VMware environments, and with the Spring 14 release, it expands on that with broader VMware support, as well as support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Again, full system backup is the priority here.

“Two thirds of our VMware business is small business storing the images locally for quick recovery times, and spinning them back up locally,” DeLouis said.

The combination of unified tools to manage backups and more comprehensive backups have the potential to make the backup business, a backbone service for many MSPs, more lucrative, suggested Neal Bradbury, vice president of channel development at Intronis. Because solution providers can realistically offer a faster recovery time objective than they could in the past, they can offer that faster recovery service as a premium option over the core backup service, particularly for mission-critical applications and systems.

DeLouis said Intronis expects “two, maybe three” additional releases over the course of 2014, in keeping with its seasonal cadence.

“We’ve got a couple stacked up right behind this that we’re looking forward to getting to market,” he said.

Priorities in upcoming releases will include optimization of the deduplication of data in backups.