Probax, which sells entirely to MSPs, and has built beyond its original base in Australia to develop a good presence in the U.S. and Canada, is already seeing strong interest in the solution, which is the first of its type that Dropbox has certified.
Kevin Allan, Probax’s founder and CTO
LAS VEGAS – Probax, an established Australian business continuity vendor which recently moved their head offices to New York City, has announced a significant new strategic partnership with collaboration vendor Dropbox. Probax has also launched their Dropbox Backup & Archive solution, which extends the retention of Dropbox data beyond the 180 day limit that Dropbox natively provides. Probax talked about the Dropbox deal and their presence overall in the North American market at the CompTIA ChannelCon event here.
Probax is focused exclusively on selling to MSPs.
“We started selling to small business, but we have been dealing just with MSPs for over a decade, said Kevin Allan, Probax’s founder and CTO.
The company is fifteen years old, originally based in Perth Australia, but has just moved its global headquarters to New York City. They were not created to develop business continuity products, but wound up evolving into the role.
“We started as an IT consultant at a small business incubator,” Allan said. One company got broken into and all the stuff got stolen. They were broken into again, and this time, we had everything backed up. So in 2004, we switched to being a backup company.”
The nature of the Australian market helped them build up their business.
“What would happen a lot is a U.S.-based backup company would sell to customers in Australia, but found that it became uneconomical to keep data there,” Allan said. “So they would migrate the data out to the U.S., which is at odds with our data governance. Sometimes they would do this without even telling anyone.”
In recent years, Probax has moved into the North American market, with some success.
“About 4-5 years ago, we got our first North American clients,” Allan said. “They were using a similar backup company to us, which was acquired. They found us deep into a Google search. We have been growing quickly in North America since then. We found that MSPs buy differently here, with peer groups being very important. So we started partnering with Peer Groups in the U.S. and Canada.”
Today, Allan describes the number of MSP partners as being in the high hundreds “They vary in size massively,” he said. “We are also well into double digits in Canadian MSP partners.
Strategic partners like Dropbox are important to Probax’s business. Veeam is an important strategic partner.
“We sit on their cloud advisory council in the APJ region, and are in their Veeam Vanguard elite group of global influencers,” Allan said. “We help shape the products in development. We designed an automated virtual tape library and archive-as-a-servcie solution [Probax Honeycomb VTL] and won their global innovation award at the 2018 VeeamON conference in Chicago. Wasabi has also become a significant partner, once they had become a little more established and we knew they would be around for a while.” Microsoft is an important partner around Office 365, while StorageCraft was once a strategic partner, but is no longer.
The Dropbox partnership evolved through an ad hoc solution that Probax designed for an MSP.
“Dropbox only has 180 days of native protection, and one of our MSPs wanted it to be longer,” Allan said. “So we built something that did that. Dropbox found out about it, and now we have become the first vendor to have something like this certified by them. We have now been working on this for over a year and a half.”
Dropbox Backup & Archive is available on a monthly subscription for MSPs who use any of Probax’s Managed Data Protection Services, including Managed Backup, Managed Disaster Recovery and Managed SaaS Protection. Pricing is based on fixed per user pricing for either Dropbox Business (Standard, Advanced & Enterprise) or Dropbox individual plans (Basic, Plus & Professional).
“I think that this is a very big deal,” Allan said. “Before the release had even gone out, people were coming to us saying that they had been referred to us from people I had never heard of, in regions we didn’t know much about.”
This was Probax’s first ChannelCon event.
“It was recommended to us by a Canadian, Troy Cheeseman, of CloudOak,” Allan said.
Allan was highly positive about the event and the exposure to MSPs.
“It would be awesome if the show floor was open longer though,” he noted.
