At BackupAgent we find it very important to nurture the relationships we have with our partners. Lately we are noticing that some partners are benefiting from this, because they’ve listened to our advices. They’re obtaining more and more positive press and it mainly concerns the price/quality ratio for online backup services they provide.

Things that matter

• Usability:
  This is by far the most important requirement when it comes to obtaining significant numbers of customers. You must assume your SME customers will be trying multiple tools and if they feel comfortable using the application, they will go with it.

• Total cost of service:
  Our partners’ selling price and margins really matter, because they can beat competitors on price, while your sales staff is highly rewarded. At BackupAgent we specialize in keeping all costs low. This involves hardware investments, datacenter costs, project overhead etc. Our software allows you to be competitive with a minimal investment. Our approach to reach this goal is to advise our partners to be ready using a scalable and high-available environment from the start.

• Provisioning (either directly or through resellers):
  Allowing customers to buy services easily is one of the most critical success factors when it comes to providing online backup services. Offering a similar experience to resellers proofs to be even more valuable.

Things that do not matter

• License costs of the BackupAgent software:
  Whether you buy from us or from one of our competitors, the license costs of the software will be at highest 30% of the total costs of service. This means it is far more valuable to focus on lowering costs of the remaining 70%, in which we specialize.

• Branding features:
  We have partners that rebrand the services and we have partners that decided to go with our brand. We can’t see any difference in success or pickup ratio amongst these partners.

• Data traffic and peak load:
  Our partners all show a data load graph which looks like a normal distribution. Peak loads will not be too high and hit at night.

These shortlists are extracted from our experiences with successful partners. Using our software they provide best bargains for online backup.