Bruce Laing, Head of Operations and Technical Services at Risc IT Solutions, expects Redstor’s new e-commerce marketplace to save many man hours for managed service providers.
He welcomes the way the Redstor Marketplace is streamlining the sales journey by delivering self-service, automated, cloud-based data management.
Redstor's feature-rich, self-service portal enables MSPs to do everything for themselves via a simple, powerful interface.
This avoids the frustration of waiting for a vendor bottleneck to clear and gives MSPs full control over trials, account limits, billing etc. Redstor remains on hand to provide assisted selling and 24/7 support when required. Bruce said: “In our business we provide a direct service and have partners. This enables us to scale Redstor directly to clients more quickly, and I can also see partners loving the self-service aspect that allows them to push the service out to their customers. “We are totally on board with customers being able to self-serve. It’s a brilliant idea. “Customers are asking for that capability now. They want to be able to increase and decrease their data protection and be left to it, only calling on us should they need technical support. “Being able to see historic consumption is important from their point of view as well. One of our partners had not done a reconciliation for a while and realised that their customer had been charged for 50GB of storage when it had actually increased to 300GB over the last six months. “This new way of billing – along with notifications of when a customer has increased storage – will have an immediate impact.”
From obtaining a demo and a free trial to easy account management, Redstor's automated portal is the one-stop shop for MSPs.
Providing complete visibility, it’s the single place to manage Redstor, deploy all agents and control customer data. It’ll save MSPs time and operational overheads.
Bruce said: “This massively reduces the management overhead and impact on our technical and provisioning teams.
“When we did something similar around 365, there was a lot of reticence about giving our resellers, our partners, the ability to self-serve instead of coming to us. “The thinking was ‘They won’t do it, they won’t bother. Why would they do it when they can just email us?’ but a lot of them love it now and only contact us for technical support.
“We saved at least three months of man hours just by putting in that self-serve provision platform – so a huge saving from our point of view.”
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MSPs can manage all their customers’ data in one place through Redstor - including Microsoft 365 and G Suite data.
Redstor is the only vendor offering this online, holistic service – for the widest coverage of data. Bruce said: “People are just expecting self-service platforms now. That's how customers want to interact with us. “Self-service keeps coming up again and again along with the ability to decrease when they can.”
With dashboards for enhanced data visibility and insight, however, Redstor makes it easy for MSPs to identify additional revenue opportunities. This improves customer retention and creates upsell opportunities.
“If we don’t have an offering for managing your own backups and storage then we would be left behind," said Bruce.
By accessing the Redstor Marketplace App, MSPs can provide backup and recovery, archiving, DR and insight – all for a single price.
Customers can clearly see the value in a 4-in-1 offering. Bruce said: “I do like the service descriptions that Redstor has for each product. Having that high-level overview of the product is helpful because customers do not need to make all those basic pre-sale questions and calls. “Again, that reduces the load on our sales team. They can just say ‘here’s the App. Have a read of the description, if you have any questions, come back to us. “A lot of our customers don’t know that we back up 365, then others only back up infrastructure and don’t know that we can resell 365. The Redstor Marketplace allows us to start conversations around backing up and selling 365, opening up new revenue streams. “A few of our partners have massively onboarded customers' 365 data recently. We’ve had about 8TB more 365 data. Enabling partners to spin up 365 protection for their customers more easily through AppDirect allows them to increase the sales opportunity quickly for them and therefore for us.”
As a single vendor providing a unified platform, Redstor offers the unique capability to live stream a customer’s backup, archive and DR data, while offering invaluable insight into an entire data estate.
InstantData™, Redstor’s intelligent recovery prioritisation technology, eliminates downtime and delivers cost-effective DR by streaming accessed data, while a server is recovering.
Bruce insists that the assurance of bullet-proof access to all data on demand, wherever it is stored, including Microsoft 365 and G Suite via single portal is a major selling point.
He said: “Our partners and customers like the fact that Redstor is so reliable. They can install it, select files to back up, get a tick in the background and know that it will just work.
“They like the monitoring and level of reporting – that they can see which accounts have failed, which ones are backed up, when they last backed up. No more log checking.
“This new initiative represents the final steps Redstor is taking towards being a fully cloud-managed backup provider - allowing the onboarding, provisioning, set-up, monitoring, restoration and billing of customers and their data.”