Backlash over backup vendor's 'MSPs are dead' move

It's unlikely that XByte is alone in switching to Max Backup: parent company LogicNow sought to capitalise on the unrest with a worldwide promotion for the backup product, which reads:

"Have you been affected by recent changes at Vembu? If yes, then you should consider moving to feature rich MAX Backup for total peace of mind. MAX Backup is the most complete onsite & offsite hybrid-cloud solution available. It will help you grow your business and increase your revenues by providing a high-value backup and recovery service to your customers."

Vembu's vice president, Len Srinivasan, explained to CRN why Vembu had moved away from a white-labelling model and toward a more traditional software resale approach.

"We strongly believe in [the] channel model and wanted our products and services distributed through the channel," said Srinivasan.

"But we found that many MSPs are not channel. They actually behave like customers since as a vendor we don't have visibility on who our end customers are. In our old model, the product and business requirements are primarily driven by MSPs rather than the actual end user of our products, which are small businesses and IT administrators.

"[The] majority of MSPs were also rebranding our products and services and hence we were losing our brand value over a period of time," said Srinivasan.

Vembu still allows end user customer to create on-premise backups as well as Vembu's data centre, hosted on Amazon Web Services. "What we don't allow is MSPs hosting our software in their data centre and offering cloud backup services," said Srinivasan.

Despite the backlash, Srinivasan claimed MSPs had largely stuck with Vembu. "Based on our recent survey, 75 percent of our partners agreed to sign in to the new partner model where we don't allow rebranding and also have the data hosted on our cloud based on Amazon AWS, Google or Microsoft.  

"[The] remaining 20 percent of our partners are evaluating our newer model. Very few partners said that this new model isn't going to work for them and had to look for a different vendor," he said.