CA Evolves ARCserve Licensing for MSPs and Cloud Storage

When CA Technologies launched ARCserve MSP 2.0 licensing today, it was only one piece of a three-part story. First, CA is striving to make ARCserve licensing more appealing to managed services providers (MSPs). Second, CA wants to ultimately connect the dots between ARCserve and public cloud storage. And finally, CA wants to eliminate any lingering concerns about its commitment to channel partners.

Let’s start with the official news. The new MSP 2.0 licensing program for CA ARCserve adds subscription-based per-terabyte pricing options to ARCserve’s existing per-server model. CA’s goal is to allow MSPs to mix and match ARCserve deployments:

• On premises at customer sites.
• Within the MSP’s own hosting facility or data center.
• In a third-party cloud like Microsoft Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services, as well as the Eucalyptus private cloud offering.

ARCserve also integrates with a range of MSP software platforms — including Kaseya, LabTech Software, Level Platforms, N-able Technologies and Nimsoft.

CA’s Strategic MSP Plan

CA’s MSP partner strategy isn’t new. The company acquired Nimsoft in early 2010 and continues to run and grow that MSP-centric software business very aggressively. By late 2010, it was clear that CA was overhauling many of its software platforms to offer service provider pricing.

At the same time, CA’s managed services push coincides with CA’s growing portfolio of cloud services software — such as AppLogic, which allows cloud services providers to rapidly reploy SaaS applications.

In many ways, CA Technologies has successfully reinvented itself and distanced itself from controversies that plagued the company in the 1990s. But some opinions die hard. During a recent ASCII Group meeting in New Jersey, I discussed CA’s strategy with a few MSPs that were not familiar with CA’s latest MSP and cloud moves. The MSPs told me they had largely overlooked the latest ARCserve moves because of ARCserve channel missteps in the 1990s.

Fast forward to the present and CA seems to be delivering the right message to the MSP market. MSPmentor will be listening to learn how many MSPs tune in.