Datto Looks to Disrupt with new product rollouts -
Channelpro Publisher Michael Siggins sitting with the founder and CEO Austin McChord Datto to DattoCon recent partner event in 2016 in Nashville, Tenn. in Part 1 of this interview, McCord talks about SIRIS platform 3 and other products introduced at the conference, the Datto file synchronization and drive sharing solution, the next router Datto DNA, and opportunities these create offers for channel partners. This is an edited extract of the conversation
Channelpro-SMB :. Data backup SIRIS 3, the recovery platform, and business continuity now supports Mac. What is the Mac opportunity for partners and distribution partners in general
Austin McChord: We think it's an incredibly strong growth opportunity for our partners. If you look at the workforce for SMEs, Mac laptops are virtually ubiquitous, certainly in the data. The percentage of people using Mac continues to grow. So we think it's a great opportunity, especially because it is incredibly underserved. There's hardly anyone out there with any solution whatsoever for Mac.
So to have a complete backup agent based on the image for Mac is a big deal. And we think this will open up a huge opportunity for MSPs and can allow them to dig into some customers that they might not have been able to enter before. Now they can stand out from almost anyone else there because with Datto there is a true story for DR Mac
Channelpro-SMB :. Can you tell me a little more about adding the X1 family of SIRIS products, mainly at the entry? What you with this decision and how much impact do you think it will do
McChord: Looking to make something interesting and different, and so we realized we kind of do two things with our product. When I talk about the range of products and professional SIRIS business and business models, it is really pushing those more market ... to compete in an area of the business.
At the same time, we do not want to leave our SMB roots, especially the little guys; we wanted to ensure we had an excellent solution for this. And so that's really where it came to be. We realized last year, Datto shipped well over 10,000 SSDs as part of our product. So we buy SSDs in large enough quantities for some time. And it turns out that this is actually a great place for us to make our first foray into the all-flash space. I think you'll see that the flash will spread deeper into our product models over time, but it's a great place for us to start.
So our thought is that we could build an amazing product at an amazing price considering what he has. Just the idea that you get the whole box and it is so affordable, but it has a terabyte of storage SSD in it. It's impressive. Yeah, I think we just kind of fell in love with the form factor and the model and the fact that we could do it. So it generated its own dynamic. We think this is a fantastic fit for our customers
Channelpro-SMB :. You also talk about Cloud infinite retention. Want to target specific markets for this
McChord: We find regulatory pressure whatsoever HIPAA, PCI, FedRAMP [Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program] -all these things are putting more and more pressure on companies to retain data for longer and longer periods. And so we wanted to make sure we were a catalyst for that, in a way that was affordable so that any company can use it.
It took a lot of engineering on our side to build a piece of infrastructure that could actually store the data. And we could keep it, we could keep the integrity, we could prevent bit rot, things like that for a very long period of time of about five, 10, 15, 20 years.
We thought it would be a very convincing argument, and something that the majority of our customers will be interested I do not think it's isolated to a vertical individual. I think it is in the set
Channelpro-SMB.? Do you treat data differently
McChord: Internally at the rear end there are different things that we do when we reflect on how these sets age data. And so there are changes we make are largely imperceptible to our partners. But if you want to bring everything you've done in the last day, the chances that your restore is going to be something that comes from the last day or last week are quite high. So we can bring that data back in periods of under a second time before our systems begin to access.
So when I think of the data that could be five or seven years, chances given day you need are much lower. And so we can make choices optimization of infrastructure so that data does not come online, or does not need to be available sub one second but you might be prepared to wait 30 seconds for the bring. This is still very, very fast, but the point of view of energy consumption, as imagine if it were a hard drive, we could turn this hard drive down. It need not be spinning all the time. So these are the kinds of things which are changes that occur in the rear end which make it possible for us to have an offer like that
Channelpro-SMB :. You talked about Datto entering the networking space with DNA and this moves the logic or strategic extension of BDR offers
McChord :. I think it fits our mission to protect corporate data, regardless of where she lives, and increasingly transits business data back and forth between the cloud and back. And to be in this position and provide a product offering there that protects it really counts. And I think we can bring enterprise-class technology regarding safety, regarding the management of threats to the level of SMEs, in the same way that we really brought enterprise features quality, type in our high availability. SIRIS product
We want to provide the same safety features at company level, the same as Datto must implement and execute on our huge cloud that we operate; how to bring this same technology to put down our end users SMB
Channelpro-SMB :. Initially you targeted a fall deployment to Datto DNA. What happened with the target
McChord: We had a lot of units in the hands of partners, and they said great; you can not ship this product without Wi-Fi. To add a Wi-Fi means that we had to get all [units] remanufactured to add a location to insert a Wi-Fi card. Then we had to go back and re-certification of the FCC and carriers because we added new radios so that the RF emissions profile of the product has changed.
We had to change the shape of the antennas and their locations on the device in order for them to work. And we had to get approvals throughout the stack for that to happen. So a huge amount of work.
This is one of those things where I feel like we have a chance to get this right. And there is no market for a router that is not reliable and does not work all the time. And so I need this to be right before I can ship it. And I am prepared to tolerate this being late, even if it is very late, so I know it will be great when it is done
Channelpro-SMB :. You referred to this as the biggest betting Datto, and you do not want to be an also-ran in this space
McChord :. We want to disrupt this space. It is a new space; it is different for us. We have years of experience DR. We have a lot of experience of our infrastructure management network, but this is still providing cellular modems, bringing in Wi-Fi radios. This is a step beyond our expertise and we have learned to build this new expertise, and it takes some time. We thought about how we developed this product and we thought it would be best to do it outdoors and with the feedback of our partners that develop in secret and just show with her later this year as did.
And feedback from our partners has made a huge impact in its initial direction, when we announced last year. So much so that we ship because they asked so many changes. And it is this cycle that is quite painful, but I think at the end it will be very rewarding
Channelpro-SMB :. The DNA includes a network firewall. We were told there is additional UTM features coming in future editions. So is this the first part of a larger movement for you in the security market
McChord: We believe that DR is a huge part of the story security anyway. If you look ransomware it ends up being the # 1 reason why we restore right now. We are the last resort when someone is infected with ransomware. But if we could build products that get in front of him and blocked from ever occurring, it would be so much better.
We should be able to block it right on the front end. We are in an incredible position because we have all this data. We can isolate and view thousands of incidents ransomware through our customers. And when you start to aggregate this information, we can use this information to block ransomware before it enters the next customer? And it is where you start to see DNA and departure DR history overlap.
or what is the signature of the download that has come to this fact the cause? Because we can follow it all. And these are the things that our partners are looking for us to do, and we can innovate like almost no one in this industry. And I think it will be really exciting going forward
Channelpro-SMB.? What was the early response to Datto player
McChord: I think the partners were quite enthusiastic. I'd say we're excited about it. I think our initial launch, we had a good amount of traction and I think we have a couple more things in the pipe that I think will generate more awareness. But it is surprising how many companies register and then how a product like this almost has a viral effect. We noticed in the trends, all of a sudden there were all these churches that have been signed for Datto Drive.
We were able to track back and someone had made an announcement in a forum for "Church IT administrators," and that they had signed with Datto Drive, it was really good, etc. and the next thing you know, I have 200 or 300 churches that now use Datto Drive. And we think it will be fantastic because as they are integrated and work through this year free, then we can begin to get a MSP and distribute them as son. And we think it will be really huge, we can bring new customers to our managed service providers.
We have a great set of features continue to improve in Datto Drive.
Channelpro-SMB: So 2016, the first half was huge. What are the next six months looking like
McChord: We believe there is a tremendous growth opportunity there to continue to add more features and functionality SaaS [applications]. I think our story around SIRIS 3 being a platform for DR, adding even more things so just a great support we now have to VMware. I'd love to have Hyper-V completely on parity by the end of the year. I think that's something that is achievable.
And I think you will see all kind of these pieces continue to merge and move together like Backupify and SaaS application products are moving closer to the look, feel, use of 'interaction model for how SIRIS works. And you'll see the same thing with Datto Drive, these parts are unified by something that is really quite broad. And I think you'll see that we continue to build and probably be able to deliver a lot about this security message, especially as DNA begins shipping later this year. There is a huge amount of innovation that will come very quickly there.
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