Pax8 bolsters MSP choices in email archiving and Office 365 backup with Dropsuite, while emphasizing that they have some technology and pricing features that partners should find attractive.

Cloud distributor Pax8 and Singapore-headquartered backup and recovery vendor Dropsuite have announced a partnership which will see Pax8 offer DropCloud Backup for Office 365 and Dropsuite Cloud Backup for G Suite Gmail to MSPs in North America.

“Our partnership with Dropsuite reflects how we are uncovering new vendors and products,” said  Ryan Walsh, chief channel officer at Pax8. “That’s not the only avenue for us, as we also work with well well-known vendors, but they are significant for us.”

Dropsuite is a relatively new company, founded in 2012, and focused primarily on the SMB space. They are public, and are listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. They have a U.S. office in the Bay area, and have a presence in Canada. Dropsuite became available on the Amazon AWS data centre in Canada a month ago.

“We get a lot of insight about vendors from our MSP partners,” Walsh said. “They often help us uncover up-and-comers and that’s how we found Dropsuite. Some of our local partners had recommended them. We also came across them at some trade events.”

Walsh said multiple things about Dropsuite make them an attractive option for MSPs.

“They are easy to set up, are multi-tenanted, and have a channel focus,” he stated. “Their portal is very intuitive.”

Walsh also said that the Dropsuite technology has some differentiating elements.

“They do some things with emails that that stand out,” he said. “All emails are journaled in real time. They also facilitate multiple retention policies on one client for a robust solution. If you can’t control multiple retention policies, it’s not robust enough.”

Dropsuite’s pricing is also attractive for MSPs.

“They have great pricing, with no  minimums and no import fees,” Walsh said. “That’s unique. When I was with MX Logic we had import fees, and charged on an ongoing basis. Then we moved to charging by years of retention, and then to a one time fee, but there was always a fee. This trend of not charging removes a friction point.” They also do not charge ingestion fees or setup fees. While DropSuite has a freemium model as part of their broad go-to-market strategy, Walsh said that this is not present in their Pax8 relationship

Walsh emphasized that DropSuite plays an important role executing Pax8’s strategy around their Stax Business Intelligence tool, which is designed to give MSPs more visibility into their customers’ technology stacks, and facilitate upsell and cross-sell opportunities that provide more complete cloud solutions.

“Pax8 Stax provides the opportunity to fill out these solutions,” Walsh said. “MSPs want options. Stax has four main categories in productivity, continuity, security and infrastructure, Within productivity, we have subcategories in email archiving and Office 365 backup. Those subcategories are very important to us. So having another option is great. In addition, however, Dropsuite has a legal-grade email archiving solution and an Office 365 solution together. That makes them unique. They also have Cloud Backup for G Suite Gmail.”

In addition, Dropsuite’s backup provides unlimited data storage, unlimited retention if desired, no need for a user agent, GDPR compliant advanced search tools, military-grade 256-bit advanced encryption, and a free Insights BI email analytics toolkit.

“Dropsuite has made North America a target market within the last 12-18 months,” Walsh said. “A product like this can shine because it’s so easy to set up and run, with the intuitive portal. They recently launched a free Not-for-Resale trial for MSPs, and we have seen many partners jumping into accounts to try it.”