Scott Morris on Druva’s SaaS-based MSP program

Spread the love

Mumbai: SaaS-based data protection provider Druva recently announced its MSP program for partners in the APJ region. Druva MSP program is part of its Compass Partner Program. On the sidelines of the launch, Druva’s Regional VP for Asia-Pacific and Japan, Scott Morris spoke to TechHerald about Druva’s SaaS-based MSP program and shared some detailed perspectives to better understand the newly launched program.

Q1. Is there no commitment from MSPs for the Druva MSP program compared to most MSP programs available in the market from other vendors? So what’s the business model here for Druva?
Scott Morris: There is a commitment. I’m not saying there’s not a commitment. There is a minimum subscription that they will sign up for, but it’s a subscription service that they can instantly turn on. And the difference here is there’s no need for them to buy hardware, software or implement an underlying platform.

When I say they are able to monetize from day one, of course, we wouldn’t sign up somebody who’s not going to make a commitment. But we are looking for a commitment that is – how do we go and identify a customer base that either is existing and serving from an existing capability and wish to migrate into a more efficient and effective way of monetization and improve overall total cost of ownership. Or for newer MSPs that are looking to go and acquire new customers?

We look at what does that marketplace look like? What is their minimum starting margin position and then start with a customer that’s already about to start by turning on. And the day that customer turns on (service) effectively is the day that they monetize or are able to start making money.

Where in a previous model, because they’ve had to sync capital into infrastructure, they will take time and generally it’s between minimum the earliest a 12-month return on investment to 18 and 24 months before that sunken cost is eliminated.

Q2. So basically, Druva is pushing a subscription service through this MSP program, right?
Scott Morris:
That’s correct. So it’s aggregating. They (MSPs) are making a commitment to say we’re going to bring on ten customers a year. This is our minimum monthly commit. We’ve got these three customers that are ready to come on now and then incrementally for each and every subsequent customer.

They bring on either consume their underlying minimum commit or can accelerate or even increase that minimum commit to getting a higher discount from us into the next tier of the program and effectively make more money.

Q3. And would MSPs require any kind of configuration in pushing your service from an infrastructure point?
Scott Morris:
The work gets done, gets done upfront. It’s really around the architecture of the services catalogue and what solution they’re going out to their partners with. There is no maintenance to perform — no sizing or upgrades need to perform. There is no pre-provisioning that they need to do effectively. They really can focus on what their core objective is, which is identifying customers and bringing them into their MSP portal.

What we have done that I didn’t mention is that we actually have created a unique console for the MSP community. So they actually have through multi-user view, multi-tenant view of their underlying assets. So what you’re often finding is again, that MSP becomes the aggregator of the complexity for traditional solutions where they’re having to put in individual siloed solutions from the vendor and manage them as individual siloed solutions.

We’re creating and have created a multi-tenant portal that lets an MSP see all of their customers at a top-level and then individually and securely manage each one of those customers with their own individual capability.

Q4. Are you looking at a particular class of MSPs for this program or is it available to all sorts of partners?
Scott Morris
: Typically what we’re finding is the MSP partners that have typically got a very strong alignment to cloud migration and that goes in with the focus from both IDC and Gartner talking about enterprises transitioning to cloud-based workloads.

And often many of those customers as they transition their on Prem traditional infrastructure to cloud. They’re also looking at how do they remove other complexity and so they generally work very strongly and tightly with an MSP that is not only helping them migrate but also helping them manage in the background. So they become an ideal target for us.

And clearly, as you look at those MSP priorities, any MSP that sees backup and recovery either as a top priority or a growth area becomes an immediate target.

Q5. Would there be any place for a place for hyperscalers like Amazon?
Scott Morris
: We already are the hyperscaler offering and we built our platform on AWS. So we’re already native-born in the cloud solution and if anything AWS should see us as one of their strikes.

In fact, in the Asia Pacific today we’re the third largest ISV in the APJ community and the other two I can’t recall the other two names but they’re security-based Is fees on a global basis. I believe Druva still sits as one of their largest storage consumers globally.

So we in our own right are partnered very strongly with AWS and we’ll be working closely with them to work out who are the most aligned service providers that we could potentially partner with by adding this incremental backup capability.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *