With its own control platform built out, and new hooks into key RMM vendors, Storagecraft is focused on management as it looks to larger customers.
Matt Urmston, director of product management at Storagecraft
With a new focus on management and monitoring, backup and disaster recovery firm Storagecraft is aiming to make its wares easier for MSPs to use in the environments they’re most familiar with.
The company, best known for its Shadowprotect backup and recovery products, has been quietly adding to its lineup with a remote monitoring and management tool for its products called Shadowcontrol, and with integrations from MSP-friendly RMM and PSA tools, as well as with technology environments, such as that from VMware. Matt Urmston, director of product management at Storagecraft, said it was the result of the company finding itself in customers it hadn’t anticipated, largely thanks to its partners.
“Management, for us, was a bit of an issue as we start showing up in larger environments through our MSPs,” he said. “We were hitting some limits, and we made the determination that we had to build out a management and monitoring base.”
That includes building integrations into popular RMM and PSA tools that its MSP customers use, including N-able, Level Platforms, Labtech, ConnectWise and Autotask, as well as introducing its own “endpoint monitoring system,” the aforementioned Shadowcontrol. And it also includes building its management capabilities into VMware’s technology stack. At last month’s VMworld in San Francisco, the company showed off its vSphere integration as a pre-release, with general availability slated for next month’s VMworld in Barcelona.
“We felt the need to go out and do some integration into the VMware environment as well, so that VMware admins don’t have to bounce from vSphere into something else to manage ShadowProtect,” Urmston said.
Shadowcontrol, manifesting itself on endpoints as a lightweight agent that allows for remote management and the ability to drop and active licenses of Shadowprotect centrally. Urmston stressed that his company’s own product is not aimed at taking on N-able and its competitors in the crowded RMM space, but to provide a way to centrally control its own products, particularly for MSPs who haven’t made an RMM platform choice as of yet.
“We have no intention of going into the RMM space, but we do know we have some partners who aren’t using RMM tools today, and just want to see what’s going on across [their customers’] environments,” he said. “As we grow from here into larger companies most of them will be using RMM tools, and we’ll hook into those via API. In smaller environments, MSPs will still use our console, but a lot of that traffic is going to be redirected into some other RMM tool.”
The company is still in its first wave of adding management capabilities to its lineup. Up next is a solution for Linux-based customers, “something we’ve been working on for a long time, and anticipate for next year,” and into the latter part of next year, the company expects to “make some big announcements around management and platforms,” Urmston said.
“We’ve still got holes to fill, but we’ve identified what they are, and we’re excited about some of the projects we’re working on,” he said.
