Slide Says No to Platform
At a time of nearly universal faith among software makers in multi-function platforms, former Datto CEO Austin McChord’s new company is betting on best-of-breed.
Former Datto CEO Austin McChord, for those who don’t know him, has a history of making bold proclamations. While still an undergraduate in 2007, for example, he told peers that the backup company he’d recently founded would someday sell for $1 billion.
Ten years later, he brought that vow to life with a reported $500 million to spare, a transaction followed some five years afterwards by an even bigger one involving Kaseya.
And now he’s back with another bold proclamation that he all but dares you to question. At a time when every leading name in managed services, very much including Kaseya, is utterly certain that multi-function platforms are the way of the future, McChord (pictured) is moving in the opposite direction.
“We think backup is the single most important product that MSPs buy, and we think that it makes sense for MSPs to buy a best-of-breed solution for backup,” he says. “We felt like there weren’t great options out there right now, so we created one.”
The “we” in that statement is Slide, the BDR-for-MSPs vendor that McChord, former Datto colleague Michael Fass, former Cork CEO Carlson Choi, and others officially launched in February. And the evidence all of them believe proves best of breed beats platform is readily visible in platform maker BDR solutions, according to McChord, who believes most such systems feature broken, outdated interfaces.
“It almost feels like you’re wandering around a dead mall,” he says.
Slide’s solution, by contrast, is entirely new construction, starting with the Z1, a hybrid cloud on-prem appliance with AMD chips and an NVMe SSD. “It’s extremely fast, thousands of megabytes per second,” McChord says.
The cloud it connects to is flash-based as well. “Which means that you can restore information incredibly fast, and the software is built to take advantage of that,” McChord says.
That software’s also been designed to accelerate a technician’s backup work. “The ease with which the user can navigate it and then spin up a virtual machine, do a file restore, all of these different activities, whether they’re operating from a cloud instance of their backup or the device instance of a backup, is astonishingly different than the experience that they have with the other vendors in the space,” Fass says.
If all of that sounds reminiscent of Datto, Slide’s take on partnering will too. The company offers the month-to-month pricing managed service providers often prefer, for example. “It helps keep us aligned with our MSPs,” McChord says.
Slide has a larger appliance named the B1 (the “B” stands for “big”) as well as solutions for protecting data elsewhere than on servers in the works. “Our job as a backup company is to provide solutions to MSPs to backup their data wherever it’s going to reside,” Fass says.
But he and McChord both insist that Slide will remain a backup company rather than a platform vendor going forward. “All of these backup vendors have gotten folded into these larger sort of conglomerations and big businesses,” McChord says. Slide’s refusal to follow suit, he believes, gives it a competitive edge.
That’s another bold proclamation to be sure, but I’m not sure I want to make the same mistake so many Rochester Institute of Technology students once made by betting against the man.
Enough reading
How about some listening, like to the interview with NinjaOne’s VP of product strategy on this episode of the podcast I co-host? Just as informative. Far less work.
