Carbonite Inc. is giving VARs a new slate of SMB products to offer their customers and more support tools to resell them.
The Boston-based company provides cloud backup and recovery servicesfor the consumer and SMB markets. But until recently, Carbonite’sreseller program only included its Carbonite Home product targetingconsumers. The revamped VAR program gives resellers access to four newproducts created by Carbonite in the past year: HomePlus andHomePremier, as well as two SMB offerings called Business and BusinessPremier.
“We targeted the home and home office user. We‘ve begun to reallytarget the SMB audience as well. So now it’s not just individualsworking out of their home but also small companies (based outside thehome),” said Dave Hauser, director of channel programs at Carbonite.
Demand for SMB products
The change is a response to the growing SMBmarket, an increase Hauser said has been duly noted byCarbonite’schannel partners.
“We had 1,800 resellers only selling the home product. We hadincredible demand from resellers asking for the business product,”Hauser said.
The four new products are available at the following prices for aone-year subscription: HomePlus is $99 with unlimited backup storage,HomePremier is $149 for unlimited backup, Carbonite Business costs $229for 250 GB of storage, and Carbonite BusinessPremier comes with 500 GBfor $599. For both business products, extra storage can be purchasedstarting at $46 for an additional 50 GB.
Pricing is a key part of Carbonite’s competitive strategy, Hauser said,referring to in-house price comparisons showing Carbonite’s businessbackup products as lower priced than those offered by rivals Mozy, SOS,Symantec, Dropbox and iCloud. According to Carbonite, only Google’scloud-based backup and storage offerings are priced similarly toCarbonite’s, with both company’s consumer offerings coming in at $59for 100 GB of storage. But Carbonite says Google’s service doesn’t comewith unlimited U.S.-based phone support, something Carbonite doesfeature.
“Pricing has become an important differentiator,” Hauser said. Whenasked if increased competition from the likes of Mozy and Dropbox isputting pressure on Carbonite to lower its prices even further, Hausersaid, “We are so significantly lower (priced) that we have not had that(issue).”
More technical support
Carbonite has also upgraded the technical support available toresellers.
“We offer tier two support for resellers which we didn’t offerpreviously,” Hauser said. “(VARs will) be able to receive a higher(level) support person who can answer more complex support questions.”
Carbonite’s online channel portal has also been updated to make iteasier for partners to manage and monitor their accounts with improvedfunctions for account histories, contact searches, customer orders andsubscription renewal alerts. VARs can now email clients directly fromthe reseller dashboard and quickly renew subscriptions or add storage.
“We’ve taken the ease of use we’ve been known for and made sure that’snow within the Carbonite reseller dashboard so it’s easy to manage andfulfill orders and maintain all the different orders all a resellerhas,” Hauser said. “It makes it much easier for our resellers to seeall of this information.”
ChristineWong is a Staff Writer at ITBusiness.ca. E-mail her at [email protected],connect on Google+,follow her on Twitter,and join in the conversation on the IT BusinessFacebook Page. 