The major enhancements to this new release of ShadowXafe, an MSP-friendly billing and invoicing model, and network tunnelling to simplify management of large numbers of devices, are aimed at strengthening it in the MSP market.
Last year, StorageCraft unveiled ShadowXafe, the next-generation version of their data protection product. Today they are announcing both enhancements to that product, as well as an upgrade of features designed to make ShadowXafe more attractive to MSPs.
“Six months back, we introduced ShadowXafe, along with our converged OneXafe offering, but it was more targeted to partners servicing the mid-size enterprise,” said Shridar Subramanian, Vice President, Product Management and Marketing at StorageCraft. “We are now introducing the next version of ShadowXafe. With this one, we bring the goodness of ShadowXafe to the MSP. This version is mainly targeted at them, although it will also appeal to some partners focused on the midsize enterprise segment.”
Subramanian emphasized the originality of the ShadowXafe solution when it was introduced last year.
“The first version of ShadowXafe was a revolutionary data protection product, in the ease of deployment and faster recovery and flexibility it offered to the customer – insane flexibility,” he said. “It provided significant advances over competing solutions, and allowed agent or agentless deployment depending on needs and the type of configuration being protected. In particular, it allowed for very fast recovery and very easy management – an order of magnitude faster than competing solutions. This new release brings all of these capabilities to the MSP market.”
The new release has three major enhancements, two of which are specifically pertinent to MSPs. The broader one is the addition of support for MSP environments.
“We are also adding a new native network tunneling feature that will permit the management of hundreds or even thousands of devices,” Subramanian said. “This new scalability will allow the MSPs to protect large numbers of machines without ever going to customer offices, with just a few clicks.
Just as significant is the introduction of a new billing and invoicing model that is more MSP-friendly. It offers a single license and a single, usage-based, recurring or combination billing system, as well as support for consolidated automated billing through PSA and RMM partners.
“This usage-based billing and pricing model that is more subscription-oriented aligns better with the MSP model,” Subramanian indicated.
“The impact of the speed of recovery and deployment with ShadowXafe is really impressive,” said Jeannine Edwards, Senior Director, Channel Marketing, at StorageCraft. For instance, deployment time goes to under five minutes to over an hour, with the impact to the service provider being massive. Recovery time is now 4 clicks, compared to 22 clicks. Now that this is available for MSPs, it’s a game changer, because we are the first vendor to bring them these capabilities for the business continuity and data protection category. StorageCraft was the first vendor to let them do all this in all environments, both physical and agentless.”
Edwards said that this new release will further accelerate StorageCraft’s already-strong channel momentum.
“We launched a new Partner Success program last fall. Since then, we have had 2,400 partners in the program, and we are excited about that. We have had a 26 per cent increase in average transaction size. We also launched an additional quarterly rebate program in addition to the upfront payments. In Q1, the rebates paid about were 44 per cent higher than the ones in Q3 after the program came out. We have also introduced a new partner portal, and we have seen a lot of engagement there as well.”
