Which established manufacturers will kick on this year? We asked executives from VARs and MSPs including Softcat, OCSL and ANS for their tips
Chris McQuade and Scott Hawkey
Operations director and technical services manager, PCS Business Systems
Tips: Dropbox and Datto
Dropbox launched a bid to boost the amount of revenues generated by the channel from 10 per cent to over half of the total in 2016, and also appointed Ingram Micro as a distribution partner that year.
According to Chris McQuade, operations director at PCS Business Systems, 2018 will be the enterprise file sharing vendor's year.
McQuade (pictured), who moved PCS itself onto Dropbox six months ago, highlighted Dropbox's collaborative document editing product, Paper, and the recently launched Dropbox Showcase as among the jewels in its crown.
"The product is very reasonably priced once you understand it and what it can do," he said.
"They understand their product and the market forces, and have some really good support and help around GDPR. Unlike some of the big boys like Lenovo or HP, we don't get any rebates and they don't do incentives and spif days - but you don't miss that."
Datto may be in the throes of merging with another vendor heavyweight in the form of Autotask, but the backup specialist is PCS' second nomination.
PCS technical services manager Scott Hawkey praised Datto for bringing cloud-based backup within reach of SMEs and for tracking the ransomware crisis.
"There's a lot of people in the market doing that product, but it's massively expensive for SMEs," Hawkey (pictured) said. "Datto came along with an appliance you can put on site that will take a full image copy of your server, or servers, every 60 minutes - down to five minutes if required - while scanning it for ransomware. It will then replicate that to the Datto cloud, so in the event your server dies onsite, you can fire it up on the appliance, and if the whole building burns down you can fire it up in the Datto cloud."
Although Datto has been in the UK for several years, the arrival of GDPR in May will make 2018 a pivotal year for the vendor, Hawkey said.
