Asigra this week rolled out a pricing change that may turn the market for backup and disaster recovery upside down.  The Asigra Recovery License Model (RLM) disrupts traditional BDR pricing by shifting licensing from backup capacity to recovery performance. The company rolled out the change (and other news) this week at its Annual Asigra Partner Summit in Toronto.  Asigra’s EVP Eran Farajun told MSP mentor that this new innovation in BDR pricing ensures a fairer per unit price for recovery and makes the BDR business more sustainable for providers. Here are the details.

Farajun told MSPmentor that current BDR pricing models that are based on backup capacity are now in a race to the bottom as customers store more data and frown over the expense of paying for it. 

“Service providers are constantly getting demands for lower prices,” he said.  And that had the potential to affect Asigra’s business as well.

“We needed to understand the long-term viability of our own business. we just saw something had to change,” Farajun said. The real value of BDR is in the R part, the recovery.

How It Works

Asigra’s new recovery-based pricing model still charges a monthly fee for backup and disaster recovery, providing a reliable revenue source for MSPs. But the fee is based on the recovery cost for a customer’s business using Asigra’s “Recovery Performance Score,” which Asigra told me is based on the percentage of data the customer recovers over the course of a year. Customers can recover as much data as they want, but they will never pay to recover more than 25 percent of their data.

Good Driver Discount

Farajun compares the new Asigra model to good driver rewards programs on car insurance or the ability to buy a single song on iTunes rather than buying an entire album.

Customers of the RLM BDR will start at the same score and then be tracked for the first six months, after which the price is adjusted to reflect the use of recovery. During the first year recovery use is checked twice so customers can get a better price sooner, Farajun said.

To protect against the effects of catastrophe on recovery scores, customers are provided with a waiver for the single greatest recovery event during the year.

Asigra says this new model is fairer to customers because it rewards those who invest in maintaining their IT infrastructure.

“Some customers have better hardware,” Farajun said. “As you get closer to the end of life of a piece of equipment it will fail on you more often. And some organizations  have a higher percentage of bring-your-own devices. These have a higher propensity of being lost. And there are others who do recoveries for compliance and audit reasons. They have to demonstrate they can recover their data.”

Asigra’s research on the change to pricing indicates that customers in aggregate will be recovering less data, thereby reducing costs to MSPs. But pricing for BDR will stabilize under this model.

“If you are tired of having a conversation with your customers about why their BDR price is going up, RLM is really for you,” Farajun said.

Asigra Version 12.2 Adds Google Apps Backup Support

Other Asigra news from the Summit this week included the introduction of version 12.2, an update that includes more than 100 new features, Asigra told me. But the really big ones are the following:

The support for Google Apps backup builds on the company’s previously announced cloud-to-cloud backup of Salesforce.com. The feature lets organizations back up the following Google Apps data: Google Drive (including presentations, documents, spreadsheets and more created and/or loaded into Google Drive), emails, contacts, calendars and sites.