Ex-Datto founder Austin McChord and CPO and general counsel Michael Fass are back -- and they're bringing "the best BCDR ever" to MSPs.
At Right of Boom, the cybersecurity conference for managed services providers, held this week at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada, McChord and Fass took to the stage to announce their latest venture, Slide.tech.
McChord told the audience that, post-Datto, he and Fass both felt they had "unfinished business." For McChord, he couldn't quite retire, and after tinkering with some other technology and, along with Fass, becoming involved in Outsiders Fund and other pursuits, they both felt that something was still missing.
That something is Slide, a backup and disaster recovery appliance that is built on a cloud-first foundation, with all flash-based storage and native data encryption. The entry-level appliance is slightly larger than an Apple Mac Studio, can store up to 16 TB of data, and it's fast, McChord said -- fast enough to saturate a 10 GB network connection.
"The easiest way to think about it is that Slide is super, super fast. So much so that our entry-level appliance's CPU is 50% faster than a $13,000 data appliance," he said. "Not only that but because everything is flash-based, it means that the storage is about 100x faster than most BCDR [solutions] on the market. The cloud restores are instantaneous. All of our cloud hardware is brand new and all flash-based, which means it's really, really, really fast," he said.
But it's not just about the product. McChord and Fass are building the company based on a similar set of core values that fueled Datto's incredible success, they told ChannelE2E in an interview.
"We started with the hardest problem to solve, the backup of servers, hybrid cloud environments, with our appliance," Fass said. "But we also wanted to bring back that culture and connection. So, number one, we follow the platinum rule, we do unto others as they want us to do unto them," Fass said. "We want to grow our relationship with our partners, and we're MSP only -- we'll never sell out from under you. We've got your back, and we're going to support you."
That support extends to decisions not to use Slide, McChord and Fass said.
"If you wake up one morning and you decide that you don't like Slide, you can cancel from the web interface with a single button click. So yeah, we'd like to see other vendors take some guidance from that," McChord said. He added that an open-source tool allows for accessing and restoring backups from Slide and taking them to any other vendor. There are also a number of currently available integrations, McChord said.
"Slide has a fully open and free API. We intend for it always to be that way, and we're really excited about the fact that we've worked with a ton of folks to make sure that they're already integrated," he said.
