Datto Lays Out 2018 Growth Plan

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Datto on Tuesday unveiled a road map that includes product updates, a new MSP referral program, investment in new employees, and several executive promotions. It’s the data-protection provider’s first major announcement regarding the status of its business since December’s close of its acquisition by Vista Equity — and the simultaneous merger of Datto with Autotask.

“The first priority in bringing the two companies together is to make sure that partners are front and center, and to help the two separate channels merge into a consistent, high-quality experience across the board,” said Matthew Richards, Datto’s interim chief marketing officer.

Datto’s Matt Richards

With that, Datto touched on four areas of growth and expansion in 2018:

• Product updates: The vendor updated Autotask Endpoint Management with a reporting release. The update includes a flexible report scheduler and improvements to how partners produce professional and current end-client reports. Additional features of the update impact patch management, anti-virus management and improvement in ticket creation through the unification with Autotask PSA.
• MSP Partner Program: Datto is rolling out a referral program, globally. The referral program incentivizes existing MSPs to refer new partners to the company, to the tune of a $1,000 referral bonus if their referral makes a purchase within six months of submission.
• New hires: Look at the job boards on both the Datto and Autotask websites and you’ll see that the company is hiring more than 100 new employees in both the U.S. and U.K. Datto sees a new opportunity ahead and is looking for employees across the board; for example, in sales and marketing, engineering and finance, as well as across geographies. “We’re growing so we need to support that growth,” said Richards.
• Executive promotions: Recent senior leadership promotions include Michael Fass, general counsel and chief people officer (his previous role was a general counsel); Tim Weller, chief operating officer and chief financial officer (he previously was CFO); and Matthew Richards, interim CMO. Richards has been working at Datto as vice president of product marketing.

Bigger news for partners is that operationally, the Datto and Autotask merger, into a single company called Datto, is a work in progress. The new company consists of 13,000 MSPs worldwide, with about 10 percent overlap of partners who do business with both companies. Together, these MSPs serve about 500,000 small and medium-size businesses (SMBs).

At the end of 2017, Datto reported a 36 percent increase in monthly recurring revenue; however, that figure includes financials from both Datto and Autotask, as if the two companies had been together. Datto’s business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions grew by 33 percent — that figure represents Datto legacy business at the end of the 2017.

In mid-January, Datto held its first combined sales kickoff, addressing sales and marketing. From the partner perspective, changes might not be obvious except for the swapping out of account reps, which will not impact all partners, Richards said.

Currently, the company is busy working on products, product integrations, support integrations and partner program integration, and how all of that will come together. Major announcements regarding this work will be made at …