The RapidFire agentless tool is designed to help Datto resellers prospect, by providing a detailed assessment of a prospect’s environment, and recommending the appropriate Datto solutions. Datto will give it away free to their channel.
Matt Koenig, National Sales Manager at RapidFire Tools
Atlanta-based RapidFire Tools, which makes Network Detective network assessment modules for MSPs, has entered into a new partnership with high-flying cloud data protection vendor Datto. Through it, RapidFire has created a disaster recovery tool that Datto partners can use in prospecting for new clients.
RapidFire started out as an MSP, which developed several products for their internal use, one of which was a network assessment tool.
“Through word of mouth, other people wanted to use it,” said Matt Koenig, National Sales Manager at RapidFire Tools. “They found what turned out to be a huge hole in the marketplace, doing network assessments, going in and looking at a company’s infrastructure.” They have since developed a full line with four types of IT assessment tools: general; IT Security; SQL; and Exchange – plus HIPAA and PCI Compliance modules. Koenig said RapidFire has a couple of features which differentiate them in the marketplace.
“Network Detective is completely non-invasive, which doesn’t use agents or install any software,” he said. “Competitor products tend to be agent based, so they are hard to use in prospecting. You don’t want the prospect complaining that you mucked things up in their environment.”
Koenig said that Network Detective also pulls down more information than competitor products and creates a report immediately.
“An engineer typically has to pull all this data through to create the customer-facing document, and this does it for them. This allows the partner to have a conversation immediately with the prospect. They don’t have to spend a lot of time analyzing all the data.” That information is then easily white labelled, allowing the MSP to put their own brand on the report.
RapidFire has about 5000 partners using their product. Most are MSPs, although they have several telco partners, as well as some VARs who use them for their managed services operations within the company. 500 seats and under is the sweet spot for the end customer.
“You can use Network Detective on any size customer,” Koenig said. “The only thing stopping it being used on a 10,000 seat customer is that the reports would be massive. However, when using it for prospecting, where you don’t want to print the whole thing out anyway, the sky’s the limit.”
This relationship with Datto developed because Datto was looking to create a backup and disaster recovery assessment module for themselves, where they needed a tool that could go into a big network environment, and pull down an understanding of what needed to be backed up.
“They wanted a tool that would collect a specific set of data non-invasively, which they would give to their own partners free of charge,” Koenig said. “That tool would need to analyze the prospect’s environment, and generate a proposal based on the results, with appropriate selling points specifically tailored to Datto products. It also allows them to size a customer infrastructure, and determine the speed of the network should they want to back up to the cloud.”
Koenig said that while some RMMs have developed similar tools for their MSPs, they don’t have this level of detail.
“This tool is designed to go to a customer and show them their environment, so that the partner can create a better plan to meet their specific needs,” he indicated. “Other RMMs haven’t developed something with this level of detail, that shows things like how many servers there are, and what they are actually running. And of course because it is agentless, it picks up anything on the network without having to have anything attached.”
The tool also does a bandwidth test to determine the time backups will take, which will allow Datto resellers who sell increased bandwidth solutions to offer those if the tool deems them necessary.
“This tool is a big thing Datto is doing to help their customers,” Koenig stated.
