Axcient Brings Unified Backup Solution To Partners With x360Recover

The MSP-focused vendor is pulling together capabilities from three business continuity and disaster recovery products into a single platform.

Axcient has launched the next phase of simplifying its offerings for managed service providers, with the debut of a unified platform featuring capabilities from three business continuity and disaster recovery products.

The unified x360Recover platform brings together the backup services Replibit, BRC and Fusion into a single user experience, the channel-only company announced on Tuesday.

[Related: Axcient CEO To MSPs: We Can Help You Keep Customers From Paying Ransomware]

"The real benefit is you have one product that gives you the flexibility to solve for pretty much any use case that your end user has," said Axcient CEO David Bennett in an interview with CRN. "And whether you want to have us as a vendor manage everything end-to-end and manage it in our cloud, you can. And whether you want to run it in your own data center, or in somebody else's data center, you can. Today, no one else does that kind of offering."

The launch comes as Denver-based Axcient has seen a "huge uptick" in demand for its business continuity solutions amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Bennett said.

The x360Recover offering represents the latest evolution of Axcient's x360 converged backup platform, which debuted in November and reduced the number of Axcient SKUs to 11, down from more than 1,000 previously.

With the introduction of x360Recover, the company is now down to just seven SKUs, according to chief revenue officer Angus Robertson.

It's a continuation of the simplification effort at Axcient following the merging in November 2018 of eFolder, an MSP-focused provider of data protection and file sync and share technologies, with Axcient, which had offered data protection solutions focused on Microsoft's Office 365 and VMware.

There are four key capabilities in the x360Recover offering that show how Axcient is setting itself apart by bringing these technologies together, two of which come from Replibit, Robertson said.

"Replibit has the best backup technology in the MSP space, because it's chain-free, and we can do that RPO to 15 minutes. And secondly it has this technology called AirGap, where we can protect your data even if your MSP is hacked and your backups are deleted--we have that safety archive," he said.

Meanwhile, the BRC product brings a capability called Runbooks, wherein all virtual machine compute, storage and network requirements can be preconfigured. That way, if a disaster occurs, "a tech can just press a button and it spins up all the VMs, and all the network preconfigured so you don't have to do any manual setup," Robertson said.

A forthcoming capability for the platform is direct-to-cloud backup technology, from the Axcient Fusion product, Robertson said.

"We take advantage of the intellectual property from the two companies to have all four of those capabilities in one platform that's built for MSPs," he said. "Usually you only get that in an enterprise-type solution that requires a lot of techs and IT folks to configure. But we've built it in a prepackaged, multi-tenant management way, for MSPs to manage and deliver easily to their end clients."

Previously, partners had to compromise by choosing either fast backups and slow cloud recovery, or slow backups and fast cloud recovery, said Kevin Hoffman, CTO at Axcient and a co-founder of eFolder.

"This platform takes the advantages of both tech stacks--so that you can have fast backups as often as every 15 minutes locally, replicating to the cloud or the partner's cloud, and then instant failover with the cloud with orchestrated recovery through Runbooks," Hoffman said.

Axcient says that the x360Recover offering will be provided as an automatic upgrade without any cost or migration needed.

Luis Alvarez, president and CEO of Alvarez Technology Group, a Salinas, Calif.-based Axcient partner, said the offering should make life easier while also presenting new opportunities for growth.

While all three of the solution provider's backup solutions fall under the Axcient umbrella, "the problem was, they were still pretty much three different solutions," Alvarez said. "We knew that in the roadmap that they were going to take the best of all the products and put it together so that it would benefit the partners and our clients. And that's what I think we're seeing, with Replibit being the engine that's under the hood."

The offering means that partners "can manage appliances, direct-to-cloud, virtual backups--all those things from one interface, as opposed to having to jump through multiple interfaces," he said.

"They're doing the smart thing--they're taking the UI and the backend that supports the BRC appliances in the cloud, and applying that to the Replibit appliances--which we think are better for RTO and RPO, and will be better at things like compression. It's a much faster backup scheme," Alvarez said. "We're really happy and we're looking forward to making the conversion over the course of the rest of the year."

Additionally, Axcient on Tuesday announced the re-naming of the two other offerings in its x360 platform.

The new name for Axcient's CloudFinder product--which provides cloud-to-cloud backup, including for Office 365 and Google's G Suite--is Axcient x360Cloud.

Meanwhile, Axcient Anchor--which provides secure file sync and share--has been renamed Axcient x360Sync.