Transcript
I'm Nawaz Ali. Today, we're joined by Rajat Shah, our product manager here at Rubrik. Rajat, thanks for joining. Thanks for having me Nawaz. Today marks an important step forward with the launch of multi-tenancy. What problem does multi-tenancy solve for our MSPs? Yeah, it's first important to understand the history of the Rubrik appliance. The Rubrik appliance is really the brains behind the data protection, cyber recovery, and resilience capabilities that Rubrik offers for on-premise data centers. The structural problem today for MSPs is that every end customer of theirs requires a dedicated appliance, if they want to maximize and leverage the full breadth of Rubrik's capabilities. And that creates a floor in terms of costs that compresses margins for the service providers. And at some tenant size, the math stops working. MSPs either have to walk away from the deal or they have to take those deals at a compressed margin. That closes the door for them on some of the smaller customers in the SMB and mid-market segments. And the same problem really applies to the premium services that service providers offer. Things like disaster recovery, isolated recovery environments, also require those dedicated Rubrik appliances to really maximize the value that they can offer their end customers. So what actually changes for an MSP with this launch? With our launch of multi-tenancy, we're enabling three capabilities shipping together at the same time. The core of the offering is the Rubrik appliance with the ability to share it across different end customers, while giving each end customer the experience of a fully isolated appliance, as if it's dedicated to them. Those end customers can run their own cyber recovery apps and have a view of their own data that's fully segmented from any other customers. We're also delivering the replication capability that's essential for disaster recovery and isolated recovery environments with the full breadth of cyber recovery features and the ability to fail over and fail back. And finally, we're developing a feature called Network Connectors. It solves the tenant networking problem where managed service providers with a shared infrastructure have overlapping IP ranges or configurations where they may not want inbound connections to a particular tenant's network in order to perform backup and recovery. Our Network Connectors solution enables MSPs to deploy the Rubrik appliance in their environment and still use it in the shared model, ensuring that those network isolation controls are maintained. So how does multi-tenancy improve MSP economics and unlock new services? Great question. Firstly, backup as a service to mid-market and SMB customers. That's the most immediate benefit that service providers can get with this new functionality. If your profitable minimum tenant size in the past was driven by hardware costs, that cost drops now. And secondly, the upsell of Rubrik's premium cyber recovery functionality through its enterprise edition product suite becomes an end customer by end customer decision for the MSPs rather than being all or nothing across the entire appliance. And finally, the ability to extend the backup as a service functionality into new services like disaster recovery and isolated recovery environments where the MSP brings their data center as a place that customers can recover into that becomes even more economically viable, but also valuable to the end customers that may not be able to afford managing and maintaining two separate data centers, one for their production environments and one for disaster recovery or isolated recovery. For an MSP watching on launch day, what should they be thinking about next? Two key things. Firstly, look at the services that you've been building with Rubrik or that you're looking to build with a cyber resilience mindset and consider the types of customers that you've been targeting so far and the margin model that you've been working with, potentially customers that you may have been walking away from because the economics around the hardware costs were not feasible. You can now go out and pursue those customers in a way that's margin accretive to you. Secondly, look at your existing book of business. Are there existing customers where you were offering backup as a service and you wanted to expand into new services around cyber recovery and cyber resilience, the kinds of things that are essential to keep a business up and running in the event of a cyber attack. You now have an opportunity to target those existing customers and upsell additional capabilities that customers would find valuable, thereby increasing your top line without negatively impacting your bottom line. Rajat, thank you. I'm really excited about the launch of multi-tenancy. I appreciate you joining today. Thanks everyone for watching MSP Unscripted. Thanks so much for having me, Nawaz.
