Danny Mesrop (Datto)
Datto has signed a distribution agreement with Nextgen in Southeast Asia in a first-of-its-kind alliance for the back-up and disaster recovery vendor, motivated by a desire to accelerate managed service provider (MSP) growth.
Effective immediately, Channel Asia can reveal that Nextgen will gain access to business continuity offerings designed to help MSPs build customised back-up solutions for small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers. This is in addition disaster recovery as-a-service (DRaaS) offerings delivered via the Datto Cloud and centralised client management available through the vendor’s partner portal.
“To elevate service and support for Datto partners in Southeast Asia we need to work with an extremely capable and innovative organisation,” added Danny Mesrop, vice president of Sales across Asia Pacific at Datto. “Through Nextgen, we can drive immediate impact through broader education, awareness, and a solution set that helps address the challenges Datto partners and their clients face - which include cyber attacks that threaten to bring business-crippling downtime and cost.”
To complement the agreement, Datto has also appointed Tom Fernandez as head of sales across ASEAN, relocating from Sydney to Singapore to drive local channel growth.
“We have a joint plan to grow the Datto partner community and augment their current partnerships with an enriched level of technical, operational, and sales and marketing excellence across Datto’s core technologies which are aimed at building cyber resilience for SMEs,” said Wendy O’Keeffe, executive vice president and managing director of Asia at Nextgen.
In operating as a channel-only vendor - with more than 17,000 MSPs worldwide - Datto recently rolled out a new global partner program across Asia Pacific, billed as a “maturation” of the back-up and disaster recovery vendor's channel strategy.
As revealed by sister publication ARN, the most noticeable change to the global program is the re-organising of tiers, swapping out Access, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Blue to simply Gold, Platinum and Blue Diamond.
According to James Bergl - vice president of Asia Pacific - the tier restructure was a “big ask” from the partners who were seeking a more “standardised” system in line with other global vendors.
"Datto is growing up and maturing,” he said. “And it's making it more scalable for us as well. So for us to continue to deliver the extensive and the scale of resources, we have looked at ways in which we can rationalise systems and make sure that everything is standardised. This is to deliver the best outcome and have that unified message and vision across the globe.”
Other new additions to the program include the launch of the Datto Help Center and new support processes, the unification of existing Datto communities and expanded course offerings in Datto Academy.
