Asigra’s partners are still in the process of digesting the RLM. By necessity, it is complicated and can’t be everything to everyone, but here is some of the feedback I got.
• It's a way to make backup/recovery affordable. One Asigra partner, which sells directly to customers, told me about a design company that took six months to recreate designs by hand but still could not afford the necessary backup/recovery software. He hoped that the new pricing model might meet the customer’s needs.
• It's unnecessary for my business. For some large MSPs that provide a public cloud, backup/recovery software is only a small part of the bundled cost. They said the RLM would introduce unnecessary complexity. Note that Asigra will allow MSPs to continue to use the capacity-based model if they prefer.
• Kudos for behavior change. Two MSP partners sent me the following comments:
• “Analytics to reveal restore behavior are a huge benefit. About four years ago, I thought about how our backup/recovery service would benefit from aligning prices with the labor costs associated with higher restore efforts. I couldn’t do it then, but Asigra now gives me tools to implement such a vision.”
• “The real shift that needs to happen in backups is to understand what needs to be backed up and how it needs to be kept. I think forcing people to think about what leads them to restores and what they restore will make them target what needs to be backed up better and arrange how they need to keep it more efficiently.”
Mesabi Musings
While the RLM licensing model will cause much discussion and change in Asigra’s backup/recovery world, how will it change the rest of the market?
Change is uncertain, of course, but Asigra is trying to affect it. Asigra needs to get the message across that backup is a necessary but not sufficient condition for having a successful backup/recovery environment. You have to take action where it is meaningful--and that is on the recovery side if you wish to improve IT efficiencies.
Now, vendors change only when they see it is in their favor or if customers demand it. With continuing explosive data growth, IT organizations are under increased cost and management pressures. If IT perceives a tipping point and sees Asigra’s approach as one way to improve things, then other vendors will follow suit. Time will tell, but we believe that Asigra’s throwing down the gauntlet is a good thing for its customers and the overall market.
Asigra is not a client of David Hill and the Mesabi Group.
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