Axcient: How Cutting ‘Many Throats To Choke’ Down To One Can Save MSPs Money

Axcient’s three-in-one backup platform has allowed MSP LANAIR to consolidate down from 12 vendors in the backup space to one, a LANAIR executive shared during the XChange+ 2020 Virtual Experience.

Axcient, a provider of disaster recovery offerings, knows that MSPs need to be mindful of cash flow right now and cut out any unnecessary spending. One method of cutting the fat that MSPs should consider is paring down the number of vendors they represent.

Axcient CEO David Bennett said that the COVID-19 pandemic, which has resulted in an economic downturn, is forcing MSPs to become as efficient with their funds as possible. Representing a plethora of vendors, however, can be a drag on their internal resources and focus, he said.

Rationalizing vendors gives partners more funds to then pursue business transformation or M&A, Bennett said.

“If you don’t have cash, you don’t have options,” Bennett told partners during the XChange+ 2020 Virtual Experience, being presented by The Channel Company, the parent of CRN.

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

LANAIR Group, a Glendale, Calif.-based MSP and Axcient partner, is focused on cloud, data center and security solutions. The company also was representing 12 vendors in the data protection space, a strategy that proved “very disruptive” to the business, said Neil Hawkins, chief operations officer and partner at LANAIR.

“We had an enormous amount of pressure on us to set up better efficiencies,” Hawkins said. “We had to come up with different types of platforms to manage data center backups and reducing recovery time objectives.”

To cut costs, LANAIR wanted to limit the number of products that its staff had to support, which would in turn allow the company to become more specialized, Hawkins said.

“When you’re dealing with 12 different vendors, you’re dealing with many throats to choke. Our goal was to reduce that number so that we had more leverage from the standpoint of vendor management and also be able to build a partnership,” he said.

Axcient in June debuted a unified platform that includes capabilities from three of its business continuity and disaster recovery products for partners. The unified x360Recover platform includes X360Sync; x360Cloud for cloud-to-cloud backup; and x360Recover for business continuity and disaster recovery.

“Rather than having disparate vendors, you can now manage this in a singular way to manage support, online training, users and the marketing portal, all in one easy-to-use portfolio,” Axcient’s Bennett said.

Axcient’s three-in-one platform has allowed LANAIR to consolidate down from 12 vendors in the backup space to one, Hawkins said. “Not only could we do local backups, but we were able to expand that to business continuity plans and Office 365 backup, and that’s all coming from one vendor.”

LANAIR has been able to improve reporting and reduce response times for customers by working with one vendor, which has boosted satisfaction among customers, he said.

Axcient does 100 percent of its business through the channel. The company works alongside partners to develop its solutions, according to the Denver-based company.

There are many ways for MSPs to save money and it’s not just about the dollars they are spending on products, Bennett said. It’s also about the time and effort partners have to put in to working with vendors, he said.

“It’s not about products, it’s about building solutions that can save MSPs time and money,” he said. ”It’s even more apparent now given the challenges the world has been thrown into in 2020 around figuring out what the new norm is.”

[Editor’s Note: To attend the virtual event or view sessions on demand, visit the XChange+ registration page.]