Drive Profitability With Cloud BDR Sales
By The Business Solutions Network
A CSP (cloud service provider) replaces a nonprofit customer’s legacy BDR (backup and disaster recovery) solution with a cloud-based solution, reducing management costs and creating upsell opportunities.
Many IT solutions providers fear the transition from onpremises IT to the cloud and view it as a “race to the bottom.” However, cloud service provider (CSP) SNP Technologies’ experience is proving to be quite the opposite. It was approximately six years ago that Prakash Parikh, COO of SNP Technologies, realized that cloud computing was where the market was heading and made the decision to move away from selling on-premise solutions. Within the past year, SNP has become a pure-play CSP, meaning that it no longer sells on-premise solutions and services to new clients, and it’s actively working to move clients that purchased on-premise solutions in the past to the cloud.
A recent case in point is the Agency on Aging of South Central Connecticut (AOASCC), a nonprofit agency that became a customer of SNP’s three years ago, after the CSP sold the client a backup and disaster recovery (BDR) system. The BDR comprised an appliance for local backups, plus a cloud backup service in the vendor’s cloud data center for disaster recovery purposes. About six months ago, however, SNP approached the customer about a better solution for backing up its data, which came with the incentive of lower licensing fees and a reduction in managed services fees.
Replace On-Site BDR Appliances With Pure Cloud Backup
The AOASCC has 150 employees, and the reach of its programs includes a wide range of services and information to help individuals remain safely at home as well as opportunities for older adults to stay active and engaged in their communities. Due to the client healthcare information the AOASCC handles, data protection and HIPAA compliance are essential.
“We proposed eliminating their legacy BDR solution and replacing it with Azure Data Backup, Azure IaaS [Infrastructure-as-a-Service] Virtual Machine [VM] Backup, and Azure Site Recovery, which also meet HIPAA compliance requirements,” says Parikh. As a Microsoft goldlevel partner, it’s not surprising the CSP would propose a Microsoft solution to its customer. But some may wonder why it would propose a solution that would result in a lower monthly managed services rate — especially when its customer wasn’t presenting a price objection? “There are two good reasons for this,” says Parikh. “First, we want to offer our customers competitive prices, so they always know we are looking out for their best interest. And second, this move enables our engineers and technicians to be more efficient. Instead of our employees managing 20 accounts each, they now can manage 30 accounts.”
The Benefits Of Going All-In With Cloud And One Cloud Provider
SNP’s primary sales offerings now include Office 365 (Exchange Online and Skype for Business), Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), and Azure. The CSP’s commitments to going all-in with the cloud and all-in with Microsoft are already yielding several benefits. “We no longer have to divide our attention among multiple vendors,” says Parikh. “We have one vendor we work with, and our training and certification efforts are more focused, too.”
SNP’s business strategy has led to an average revenue growth of 40 percent over the past four years, says Parikh. And with the additional Microsoft support SNP is receiving since attaining goldlevel status, Parikh predicts next year will yield a 200 percent revenue increase over this year.
And as far as its nonprofit customer is concerned, it couldn’t be happier. “After switching to the Azure backup solutions, we reduced the time it took to manage their backups 70 percent, and that, combined with the lower cost of the Azure licensing and eliminating the on-site appliance, yielded a 50 percent per month cost savings,” says Parikh. “We also have better visibility into their backups, and we receive a daily report that confirms backups are being performed successfully. On a quarterly basis, we conduct a live data restore in the Azure cloud to confirm everything is working as it should. Not long after we had moved them to the new backup, they experienced a local VM failure after their IT person tried to update a RAID (redundant array of independent disks) controller. We were able to recover their data in the Azure cloud and within two hours they were up and running. Since that time, we’ve been in touch with the client and we are in the process of selling them Microsoft EMS [Enterprise Mobility Suite], which will give their remote workers better security on their personal mobile devices and help with their HIPAA compliance requirements.”