eFolder, which offers a range of business continuity services to VARs and MSPs, is expected to deepen its support of Veeam and VMware vSphere. An official announcement could reach partners later today, sources said.
eFolder BDR for Veeam service is expected to support cloud-based disaster recovery for Veeam-protected VMware vSphere environments. The move builds on eFolder's BDR for Veeam service, which launched in March 2015.
The goal for eFolder's latest move: Allow partners to add off-site backup and disaster recovery services to any Veeam software deployment, whether it involves VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V environments -- which together command more than 75 percent of the virtualization market. I don't know if or when eFolder plans to add support for additional virtualization platforms like Citrix Systems or Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), the open source option. I'm not sure how strong the business case is to do so...
The opportunity for eFolder partners could be immense considering Veeam has:
- Over 157,000 customers;
- 9.1 million virtual machines protected; and
- 29,000 partners.
Continued Market Shifts
Of course, eFolder and its partners face plenty of competition. The on-premises and cloud-based business continuity markets are packed with competitors, many of which have pushed beyond traditional backup and recovery services. Some of those offerings have various levels of Veeam, Hyper-V and VMware support (check in with your vendor).
Moreover, in many cases the worlds of standalone MSP software platforms (PSA, RMM, BDR, file and sync services) have converged into end-to-end solutions. In some cases, that means channel partners have to select single-vendor, end-to-end solutions rather than piecing together individual best-of-breed offerings from multiple companies.
Welcome to a new age of "coopetition" -- a term coined in the 1990s by late Novell CEO Ray Noorda. The coopetition term describes a world where vendors both cooperate and compete in the market. That's certainly the reality for many of today's VARs and MSPs as they sort through BDR and other options.
