CA adds per-TB pricing to ARCserve MSP options

Steve Fairbanks CA

Steve Fairbanks, vice president of product management for the data management business at CA Technologies

For “version 2.0” of its MSP licensing options for ARCserve, CA Technologies is aiming to provide more flexibility with a new pricing model and new bundles of products.

The company has offered hosted ARCserve for about the last 18 months through a partnership with Ingram Micro, an arrangement by which MSPs paid CA on a per server per month basis. Under the new “2.0” program announced Wednesday, MSPs will have the option of paying CA based on the amount of storage they consume, regardless of the number of servers its split across.

Steve Fairbanks, vice president of product management for CA’s data management business, said the new pricing structure will make pricing simpler for MSPs managing more than about 10 TB of storage across all their customers.

“It allows them to buy one SKU from CA that is inclusive of all of our data protection capabilities,” Fairbanks said. “It makes it much more straightforward and cost effective for larger MSPs – you simply report on how much storage you’re protecting and we bill out for it.”

For those sticking with per-server options, the company aims to make some of the most popular combinations easier to access by creating bundles of products that can be purchased under a single SKU to provide full offsite disaster recovery and other popular offerings.

The company has also extended the number of RMM tools ARCserve can connect with. While the software has long interconnected with LabTech Software, Level Platforms and N-able Technologies products, the company today introduced connections with fellow RMM tools Kaseya and Nimsoft.

But wait a second…. isn’t Nimsoft part of the CA family? Well, yes. CA purchased Nimsoft in May of last year. But Fairbanks said that because ARCserve has primarily been an SMB-focused product, it made sense to optimize links to SMB-focused remote management tools first. Now that the company is looking to move ARCserve up the market a little bit, the more mid-market focused Nimsoft management tools make a lot of sense.

Fairbanks said CA is still considering connections to PSA tools like Autotask and ConnectWise, but is focused on extending RMM links first. And since most RMM tools work closely with PSA tools, ARCserve already has an aspect of PSA integration via those connections.