CA Technologies hopes to better help its service provider
partners take advantage of its hybrid cloud-enabled backup and recovery
solutions with the roll-out today of a new managed service provider (MSP)
licensing program for CA ARCserve that offers new pricing options. The company’s second iteration of its
ARCserve MSP program will now also include subscription-based per-terabyte
pricing options on top of its existing per-server model, along with several
other additional pricing options and new integration with Nimsoft and Kaseya
management platforms.
According to Mike Crest, general manager, Data Management at
CA Technologies, the new program gives MSPs the ability to more cost
effectively offer service-based data protection without worrying about market
downswings. Like with many vendors today, MSP partners have told the company
that they need better insulation from the risks posed by spikes in demand.
“Over the past couple of years we’ve seen a significant
change in our business from product and solution selling to service-based
contracts,” said David Anderson, director Basic Business Systems, saying the
program offers his firm a better way to match fluid customer needs.
Viktor Tadijanovic, technology director and founding member
of the Abacus Group, echoed Anderson’s sentiments.
“The pricing model is especially attractive to us, as it
better enables us to offer our clients the cost-elasticity that is central to
the cloud value proposition," Tadijanovic said.
In addition to the subscription-based offering for servers,
CA also tweaked licensing to add desktop and laptop backup licensing for
endpoint services, bundled licensing for combining disk-to-disk server
protection with off-site replication in the MSP’s data center, and per-host
licensing for disk-to-disk protection of Windows Server Advanced Virtual
Edition.
On the management side, CA ARCserve was already integrated
with remote management and monitoring platforms developed by N-able
Technologies, LabTech Software and Level Platforms to provide alerts for the
completion or failure of backups, low disk space on a destination drive,
excessive utilization of resources such as CPU and network bandwidth by backup
or recovery processes, and the inability to access a targeted virtual machine
or hypervisor instance. The new licensing program spreads its reach to MSPs
that run their shops on Nimsoft or Kaseya.