Calling All Solution Providers: New MRR Business Opportunity

As more and more organizations are embracing SaaS based applications like Salesforce.com, Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 this presents new monthly recurring revenue (MRR) opportunities for Solution Providers offering cloud backup and recovery services.  Organizations need to be able to protect their data that is created and stored in Microsoft Office 365 just like any other enterprise data within their IT environment – especially for those organizations that need to meet strict regulatory and compliance mandates.

Recently, Gartner published two reports titled Do You Need to Cover Your SaaS to Prevent Data Loss? and Data Backup/Recovery Factors to Consider When Adopting SaaS and in both of these reports they highlight to organizations that they need take caution as these SaaS solutions may not have native backup/recovery capabilities.  Gartner strongly recommends that, before adopting a SaaS solution, organizations should thoroughly investigate the native backup/recovery capabilities offered by the SaaS provider, in addition to its high-availability (HA) functions and disaster recovery (DR) plans.

This is where solution providers offering cloud backup and recovery services can help their existing and new customers understand the limitations of backup provided with SaaS based solutions and the business need to protect critical data residing in these applications. According to information shared publicly by Microsoft, the Office 365 community reached 7.1 million users in November 2014, increasing 1.5 million subscribers in the September 2014 quarter alone. And according to an article in the Wall Street Journal Google Apps and Office 365 are in head to head competition for adoption with companies with more than 1000 users.

If you are a Solution Provider reselling Office 365 or Google Apps, in the role of a trusted advisor you should be discussing with your clients their needs for back and retention of data being created within these SaaS based applications.  Cloud backup and recovery services could be a trailing complimentary service that you offer with the sale of Office 365 and Google Apps.

Amongst the analysts counselling organizations is Jason Buffington, Senior Analyst, ESG who is also recommending that IT and SaaS administrators should get together to ask themselves critical questions about how they are protecting native corporate data in these applications.  Check out this video to hear Jason’s advice.

So, how can Solution Providers leverage this opportunity to capture new customers and/or increase wallet share with existing customers?  First, you need to partner with a cloud backup software vendor who offers support for Office 365, Google Apps and Salesforce.com.  Ask them about their partner program and how you can leverage their platform to offer a reliable, secure cloud backup and recovery service for SaaS based applications that can also protect other data sources within an organization.  This will not only provide you with a new MRR opportunity today, but can also help increase your reach across your entire customer base if the platform can support physical and virtual servers, endpoint devices, enterprise databases and applications in the data center as well as other cloud based infrastructures like AWS and Azure.

If you are interested in exploring this opportunity for new MRR apply within today or contact Asigra at 416-736-8111 ext. 1452 to find out more about our award winning hybrid partner program.