Asigra’s Eran Farajun recently was a guest speaker in a Channel Expert Hour webinar called How to Achieve 3 Strategic Business Objectives with Cloud Backup.  During the webinar Eran discusses the benefits of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) as a strong opportunity for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to increase their monthly recurring revenue, expand their total addressable market and increase wallet share with existing customers. 

We wanted to share with you parts of the Q&A section of the webinar where attendees submitted some interesting questions to Eran regarding the move towards DRaaS.  Of course you can listen to the entire webinar here.

Here’s a sample from the Q&A with Eran:

Q: Does Google offer a free data backup product?

Eran: No. They are offering Google for Work and what they’re trying to do is to go after the Office 365 segment in order to get companies to ditch Microsoft Office and move over to Google for Work. Which is their competitive offering and they’re giving it away for free for a year.

Q: How does Asigra Compare to some of your known competitors like Datto, Accelerite?

Eran: Asigra is not a service. Datto is a service provider. It’s their vault. It’s their data center. It’s their repository and they provide you an appliance that you backup to them, as well as keep a local copy.  We don’t do that. We don’t compete with our partners. They do that. We are purely the software layer and the business guidance and so our business models are different…

Q. Manage Service Providers find themselves competing on price more rather than service.  How can they change that? How do you change that perception within the customer base?

Eran: I think one of the things that service providers need to consider or anybody facing pricing challenges is: are you pricing your service to your customers in the right way?  Are you basically giving a dollar, or euro or pound or whatever currency per gigabyte per month for the amount of data that they protect?  And effectively as their volume of data grows are you then being forced to reduce your price because of volume? What Asigra has done has created the Recovery License Model where the pricing is lower, not because the customer backs-up more data but because the customer recovers less data…

Q. How about winning with service offerings?

Eran: If you’re constantly getting hammered on price you also have to think about adding more value to the customer?  Can you do DR drills once or twice a year?  Because when you do DR drills as a service provider, you’re basically reinforcing the value that your bring to the table, and that’s where you manifest your service.  You’re basically proving your value…you gotta find ways of building processes into your service delivery model that allow you to prove your value, not just based on price.

Listen to the rest of the webinar here.