Connect grows partner community with low cost SMB services

Connect has launched an update to its business continuity offering, allowing channel partners to sell a range of backup and disaster recovery services without upfront costs. Starting at £1 per GB of data per month, Connect has built a community of 180 active resellers serving 2800 end user customers.

Three years ago, the firm created its managed services portfolio to serve its own clients then began offering a subset of products cvia a small informal channel. Mark MacGregor, chief executive of Connect, believes that part of its success is its direct approach with the channel. “We are sending out people to meet partners, demo our products and train them,” he explains. “We have created ways to make it easier for them to sell with bespoke collateral and easy to use systems.”

The essence of the Connect business continuity service is a relatively low touch engagement model which requires no local hardware. After installing a small client on each server or desktop, specifying what needs to be backed up and when, everything else is automated for the partner. Data backup starts at £1 and drops to 40p per Gigabyte, depending on volume. The pricing model is calculated purely on the volume of data under storage and not on a per user basis. This allows channel partners to generate better margins by aggregated data from multiple smaller customers.

Connect also provides off-site server replication to allow end customers to remotely access key applications like CRM or ERP in the event of a site disaster such as fire or flood. The service costs around £50 per server a month.

MacGregor agrees that there is a lot of competition in the market and although SMBs are price sensitive, he feels its value-added services will differentiate its offering. For example, Connect can restore an off-site replicated application server and backup dataset onto a replacement server and ship it out to a partner the next day. He believes these services, “cloud only” business continuity service providers “simply won’t touch”.

Connect is actively recruiting partners. MacGregor feels the combination of lower cost storage and reliable broadband services is driving rapid adoption of business continuity. The volume of data generated by SMBs is also relatively small and he estimates that a typical small firm has around 40GB of critical data for every 10 employees.