Carbonite is building a unified partner portal that will span the business continuity company's growing portfolio of organic and acquired products, CEO Mohamad Ali said during an earnings call with Wall Street analysts on Thursday.
"In 2017, we will be presenting One Carbonite to the market," Ali said. "This will include initiatives around a unified brand and naming architecture, a singular web presence, a unified set of partner and customer portal, and a common set of internal applications to run the business."
The One Carbonite effort comes at a key time for the company and its partner ecosystem. Over the past two years, Carbonite has pushed aggressively beyond the traditional consumer backup market. In addition to launching home-grown SMB backup services, Carbonite acquired EVault in December 2015 and Double Take Software earlier this year.
EVault paved the way for midmarket on-premises backup appliances linked to cloud business continuity services. Now, the Double Take Software buyout arms Carbonite with high-availability capabilities across Windows and Linux systems.
The challenge: M&A deals often lead to software and technology silos. To avoid that fate, Carbonite is building a unified portal for partners to sell the company's entire technology portfolio. On the branding front, watch for the company to rally around its core Carbonite brand and associated sub-brands -- including monikers like CarboniteSafe, Carbonite EVault and Carbonite Double-Take.
"When we're done with this portal project, any CarboniteSafe partner, EVault partner or Double-Take partner will all log into the same portal and they’ll see all the products," said Ali. "They will continue to sell the products and service the products and manage the products that they currently sell, service and manage today. But they will also be able to do the same thing with the other products."
Among the near-term opportunities: Cross-selling between the EVault customer base and partner base and the Double-Take customer and partner base, he said. "They're very similar, there is similar number of partners, similar number of customers, similar ASPs ."
Meanwhile, Carbonite has also combined its internal sales teams -- led by Paul Mellinger, an EVault veteran -- to further accelerate upsell and cross-sell opportunities with partners.
So far the moves look promising. Carbonite's revenue was $53.5 million in Q4 2016, up 53 percent from $35.1 million in Q4 2015. The company had a $700,000 net loss Q4 2016, which was smaller than the $4.6 million net loss in Q4 2015.
Rivals Aren't Standing Still
Multiple business continuity companies across the IT channel are evolving with broader product lines. Two prime examples: Datto recently acquired Open Mesh and launched a networking division that has security capabilities (i.e., unified threat management). Similarly, Barracuda is connecting the dots between its firewall business and the Intronis MSP Solutions business, which has cloud backup capabilities.
In both cases, Datto and Barracuda each are preparing unified partner programs that allow partners to source and manage all services from single dashboards.
