Datto Unveils Splashy Networking Releases at DattoCon 2018

Networking is something that’s relatively new to Datto. During keynote speeches, panel breakouts and one-one-one interviews on Tuesday during DattoCon 2018 in Austin, Texas, this week, managed service provider (MSP) attendees displayed massive enthusiasm for the backup and disaster recovery provider’s new networking initiatives. Attendees at the annual conference responded to CEO Austin McChord’s networking announcements during his keynote address on Wednesday with literal hoots and hollers, and the general sentiment among partners was excitement about Datto’s nascent but promising foray into the networking space.

Austin McChord

Austin McChord

McChord told the collected audience of 1,600 partners that Datto’s goal is to become the premier networking provider for the MSP sector, asserting that the space to date has been focused not on channel partners but on either commodity or enterprise solutions. Commodity sales tend toward mass adoption and hardware and thus are extremely affordable to partners and end users, said McChord, but don’t deliver the performance and reliability necessary for partners to deploy in a serious environment.

On the other end of the spectrum, enterprise networking is chock-full of cool features, but carries a host of challenges. It isn’t “designed for multitenant management, there’s complex and complicated licensing, it ends up being really expensive, and you’ve got to send people away for all kinds of crazy training to learn acronyms no one should have to understand,” he said to laughter from the audience.

For the last 18 months or so, Datto’s burgeoning networking group has been hard at work “day and night” trying to take the best of both networking sectors to deliver an MSP-centric networking product, complete with MSP-friendly pricing, billing that matches and aligns with partners’ businesses and multitenancy build from the ground up. The new solutions are born in the cloud and entirely channel-owned, which Datto asserted time and again on Tuesday are central to its solution strategy.

John Tippett, vice president of Datto Networking, told Channel Futures that partner demand for operational efficiency comes from MSPs having to face complexities at every turn and that trying to simplify processes drives much of the company’s solution strategy. Tippett says that Datto Networking partners have come to expect a culture of accessibility and willingness to listen over the last year and a half, and it’s from this partner feedback that the new-ish networking group gains its most valuable insights.

John Tippett

John Tippett

Eric Peterson of Illinois-based MSP Simple Communications agrees. At last year’s DattoCon, Peterson approached Tippett with a Datto Networking Appliance idea. “John helped us get what we were looking for,” said Peterson. “Not many big executives will actually stop and listen to you like that.”

During the mainstage presentation on Tuesday, Datto Networking software engineer Andrew Tran presented the company’s latest product and feature releases, three of which garnered particularly enthusiastic reactions from the crowd.

“Datto is obsessive about MSPs,” said Tippett. “We treat them all as one customer, not different types of partners.” This makes it easier for the company to more clearly define “the channel” because they look at all partners as one big managed service provider.

“It clears the fog a little when it comes to deciding exactly what the modern channel is,” concluded Tippett.