Partner Success Story

Standardization and BCDR Scalability Quadruples MSP Growth in Less Than Three Years

Complete Technology uses Axcient x360Recover Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) to streamline operations for greater endpoint management capacity.

Operational efficiency is crucial for MSPs to grow their business and achieve profitability. Central to setting a foundation for this capability is vendor management, which is especially important to deliver on BCDR promises. With each vendor that an MSP includes in their stack, a new set of processes and expertise is required of the MSP. These requirements demand additional costs, time, and resources from the MSP to properly support the technology, deliver uninterrupted business continuity, and meet SLAs. On the one hand, MSPs want to meet the demands of clients to grow their business, and on the other, operational overhead increases total cost of operations (TCO), thereby cutting into profits and margins.

The Problem

Balancing Vendors vs. Value

Unfortunately, while it sounds easy enough, MSPs commonly struggle to find the right balance among a wide range of vendors and a long list of disparate client requests. Adding vendor after vendor in an effort to please clients compartmentalizes internal knowledge within the MSP and threatens efficiency. For example, if only one technician understands the inner workings of one solution, and that solution goes down for multiple clients, recovery is limited by the abilities of that one technician.

Of course, an MSP could choose to train their technicians on various solutions, but that restricts their capacity to master any one of them. Ray Jackson, the VP of Operations at Complete Technology, a longtime Axcient partner, explained it this way:

I don’t want to have to be an expert on this solution, and that solution, and Axcient, and 20 others in the market. If you do it that way, when you’re restoring from backup, you have to start by going to the flowchart to see which product the client has. And then you have to choose your own adventure as to where you go in that flow chart and how you do the restore. That’s complicated and complex and expensive.”

With that said, on the other side of the equation, if an MSP is unable to meet the needs of their target customer because they don’t have the technology necessary, the business can’t grow and evolve.

Ongoing Challenges:

  • Legacy BCDR solutions are unequipped to support MSP growth.
  • Multiple vendors strain internal resources, require additional expertise, and inflate TCO.

The Solution

Scalability Through Standardization and Consistency

In order for Complete Technology to meet a variety of client demands while maintaining low TCO for profitability, they standardized their business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) with Axcient x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud. With hardware-free BCDR, Complete Technology delivers endpoint backup, no-appliance BDR, turn-key BDR, and public or private cloud backup with just one vendor. Axcient’s all-in-one backup technology enables consistent technician training, onboarding, certification, support processes, billing, and marketing on a single unified platform that scales for business growth and delivers best-in-class RTO and RPO for stringent SLAs

Ray sums up how best to balance these factors with a straightforward explanation;

You want to have as few products in your arsenal as possible to keep it simple, but as many products in your arsenal as you need to offer the services you want to offer.”

Ray also says, “The most important thing for us is scalability and consistency, so we are only using Axcient. We’ve had clients that have had ransomware attacks. We’ve had to do full restores. We even had a client that had a ransomware attack where the threat actor was physically in control and deleted their backups off of their local BDR. We had to work with the Axcient team and get that back from the cloud, and get it back over to our BDR. So, yeah, I’ve got a lot of confidence in x360Recover because we’ve been there and had some worst-case scenarios.”

Steps to Streamlining and Scaling:

  • Adopt MSP-only solutions like Axcient that are designed to scale up and down infinitely.
  • Standardize on a multi-purpose vendor to eliminate the consequences of vendor sprawl.

The Results

From 800 Endpoints to Over 4,000

Axcient allows Complete Technology to meet client demands while keeping vendor management costs low. Complete Technology has quadrupled the number of endpoints they manage on x360Recover in only three years with just one vendor backup. Ray describes their incredible growth:

If we look at just raw endpoints that we are managing – a workstation, a laptop, or a server – in July of 2019, that was 800. In May of 2021, that was 2,000. Today [February 2022], it’s 4,100. In eight months, we doubled the agents we are managing.”

Ray attributes their success to being able to onboard clients and endpoints quickly and efficiently with Axcient’s scalable and consistent processes. Additionally, Complete Technology has standardized its sales process to reach more leads in less time and with more effective campaigns. Rather than a laundry list of BCDR options, Complete Technology offers potential clients a single, standard offering that can be altered for price sensitivity as necessary. Obviously, Complete Technology’s approach has proven effective at both gaining new business and reducing operational costs. Complete Technology continues to work closely with Axcient to maintain its growth, scalability, and the value they deliver to clients.

Where They Are Now:

  • Quadrupled the number of endpoint backups being managed on x360Recover.
  • Increased efficiency, improved product knowledge, faster recovery, and less downtime all contribute to lower TCO and higher profits.

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