With new leadership in place, StorageCraft, the data backup and disaster-recovery provider, has enhanced its channel strategy and increased its investment in integration, including new integrations with ConnectWise and Autotask.

StorageCraft introduced its new ConnectWise Professional Services Automation (PSA) integration and Remote Management Monitoring (RMM) plug-in during ConnectWise’s Automation Nation conference this week. MSPs will experience “improved speed, scale and efficiency” from the ConnectWise platform as they manage and run their data protection businesses using StorageCraft solutions, according to the company.

Zachary Yarnes, StorageCraft’s vice president of sales operations, tells Channel Partners the plug-ins are a way to “make our partners more efficient in their daily tasks because, from a managed services perspective, efficiency is critical.”

StorageCraft’s Zachary Yarnes (left), vice president of sales operations, and Hugo Parra (right), senior director of product management, at this week’s Automation Nation.

“We’re working through our channel program also to have the right-fitting solution for the business models,” he said. “We don’t typecast partners as a MSP or a VAR, we’re working to make sure that our licensing models, our enablement tools in the channel, our sales motions are effective across the varied spectrum of MSP or VAR hats.”

Jason Magee, ConnectWise’s COO, said StorageCraft has been a long-term DRaaS partner with his company.

“With these updates, our partners can now deploy, configure, manage and monitor the latest StorageCraft solutions with the Automate plug-in, while new automation features in the Manage integration give partners the speed and efficiency needed to scale their business unhindered by operational processes,” he said.

StorageCraft also announced improved integration with the Autotask business management software platform. The updated PSA integration service is available immediately via the StorageCraft partner portal.

StorageCraft gained new leadership through its acquisition of Exablox, which occurred in early 2017.

“Historically StorageCraft has been kind of the wizard behind the curtain technology-wise and frankly we’ve held things tight to the vest, and that was the different leadership,” Yarnes said. “We’ve had brand-new leadership come in with the acquisition and … we’ve also been working incredibly hard to reinvigorate the technology and enablement tools as tools that we showcase through ConnectWise and Autotask, but there’s other tools that we’ve haven’t talked about yet that are coming up in the coming months. They’re coming to launch very soon. The leadership is much more open than the previous leadership.”

The company recently segmented its sales organization to focus on onboarding new partners and understanding their business models a little better, he said. It also hired industry channel veteran Jeannine Edwards to head up channel marketing so “our voice is more relevant to our partner base,” he said.

“Frankly, StorageCraft has been a little quiet in the…

…channel for the last 12 to 18 months as we’ve been developing our process, and our systems enablement and technologies,” Yarnes said. “So there’s a lot of great things that we’ve been doing. We’ve been a little quiet and now we’re going to start to open the doors, and voice the efforts and successes we’re having.

The company is now being “crisp” in its approach to the types of businesses it is working with, he said.

“Before we had kind of a one approach for everybody and it was very much more biased toward the assumption that we’re talking to pure-play MSPs, which … didn’t take into account that there’s so many variations in wrapping IP around our solution and how do we become more relevant,” Yarnes said. “So we’re focusing in on understanding partners’ businesses and creating efficiencies with them, and offering flexibility in the licensing models so they can be successful.”

Hugo Parra, StorageCraft’s senior director of product management, said his company is continuing to invest in its current portfolio, as well as a product line that’s now under development.

“Our investment has gone up so that we can predict the release time and functionality, and so we can react to customers, and basically be up front and the best solution on the market when it comes down to that integration,” he said. “So that’s been a lot of the messaging and it’s been very well received by the audience.”