Redstor reaches out to MSPs with Marketplace launch

There are numerous initiatives across the channel to try to make life simpler for MSPs and Redstor is looking to go further than most by launching its Marketplace.

The cloud data management specialist is cutting the ribbon on its Marketplace, a self-service portal for MSPs, which will give access to a range of options, including backup, recovery, archiving and data management tools.

The launch supports a strategy from Redstor to increase its channel base and should help the firm develop more MSP relationships.

James Griffin, chief product officer at Redstor, said the Marketplace would mark a moment when it increased its channel focus and looked to build on its level of business via partners.

“If we are going to rely on the channel to deliver growth, then we need to focus on them,” he said, adding that it included “building products that fit well in the channel”.

“The Redstor Marketplace represents a very significant investment for the company and further emphasises our commitment to the MSP market,” said Griffin. “This world-class self-service capability puts MSPs in the driving seat and equips them to get customers’ data management solutions up and running faster. What commonly took days, can now be achieved in just minutes.”

He said the firm was not only open to working with more MSPs, but had built that expectation into the development of the Marketplace from the start.

“That’s one of the major legs of the business case – the ability for it to make that happen at a number of levels, whether that is new partners in new territories, new vendors, new alliances, that’s one of the key rationales for moving down this route,” he added.

Griffin said the Marketplace would also give MSPs that served the SME community a chance to talk about managing the data that had been pushed out across other software-as-a-service (SaaS) products and it would also have an infrastructure play for larger customers that were still seeking that kind of support.

He added that Redstor viewed it as a responsibility to ensure partners could be exposed to where the opportunities were.

“One of our strategic plays is to increase coverage for more sources of SaaS,” he said. “For that smaller type of customer, there isn’t a massive infrastructure opportunity. For the mid-size organisations that do have infrastructure services, we are going to develop and deploy some new infrastructure services over the next four or five months.

“If the data is moving and it’s being created in new places and stored in new places and shared in new places and those are places that are different to the ones that we are protecting and seeing today, then it’s not the data that’s moving, but the value and revenue-generation opportunities, so if you don’t move with it, what you are left hanging onto is a declining market.”

The Marketplace has also got the thumbs-up from analysts, with Archana Venkatraman, associate research director, cloud data management at IDC Europe, pointing out that the firm was reshaping the data protection proposition, “with its pivot to cloud data management, machine learning-driven automation, cloud-native support, API strategy, and a mission to make backup a proactive aspect of data-driven strategies”.