Unitrends now leverages the Kaseya IT Complete suite, and will pay both higher margins on the initial sale of a Unitrends solution, and a full recurring revenue share for any Kaseya IT Complete solution that customer buys, ever.
The acquisition immensely strengthens Kaseya’s compliance offerings, and they immediately announced a new compliance solution from the RapidFire technology, which was sufficiently important that they delayed announcement of the acquisition for two months, until the new product was ready.
Unitrends also promotes Clark Brown, who formerly managed their DMR relationships, to the channel chief role.
This initial version of VM Backup Essentials supports a maximum of six sockets, and so is aimed at enterprise departments and SMBs, but Unitrends says that an enterprise version will be out later this quarter.
New improvements in Kaseya VSA 9.5 for technicians include native Microsoft PowerShell integration, and improved file management capabilities.
From a channel perspective, this will give joint partners more flexibility in meeting customer budgets, and should result in some Unitrends partners not working with Nutanix to begin doing so.
Unitrends sees both the new anti-ransomware capability, and two enhancements which make Unitrends more attractive to enterprises, as important differentiators for partners.
Unitrends is implementing a program based on five stars, with partners earning credit for ranking based on sales, marketing, customer satisfaction, training and social media achievements, in a system that can let smaller partners and even influencers rise in the program.
Unitrends only added a channel component to their business in 2013, and now are dispensing with direct entirely to give partners the confidence their vendor won’t poach deals from them, which will in turn encourage them to invest more in Unitrends.
