NIC Partners Delights Clients with Complete, Cost-Effective Backup and Continuity from Unitrends
Our customers have had issues with other products; pricing, patches that don’t work, problems with the backups. They haven’t had those challenges with Unitrends. Once you install, Unitrends is set it and forget it. Nil Radadia
Director of Sales and Alliances
Unitrends Solution for NIC Partners
- Wide range of customer environments
- Physical servers
- Virtual servers – Hyper-V, VMware, Nutanix AHV
- Cisco UCS
- Microsoft 365
- Google Workspace
- Flexible deployment options
- Holistic customer support
- CapEx and OpEx billing models available
- Cisco UCS protection
- Ransomware detection
- Hybrid Cloud support
- SaaS data protection
The Challenge
As modern data center infrastructure has shifted from traditional on-premises physical servers to complex virtualized infrastructure that spans from on-premises to the cloud, NIC recognized that a new approach to business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) was needed.
“Prior to Unitrends, we had kind of lost out on that business,” says Radadia. “Others were capturing the backup business until we became a Unitrends partner.”
The decision to expand NIC’s scope into BCDR wasn’t strictly about the numbers. In working with many of their customers, Radadia and the NIC team learned about a number of challenges they’d faced with incumbent providers.
“The biggest pain point for most of my customers was price,” recalls Radadia. “Another was support. They would have to call a server manufacturer, a software manufacturer and then maybe another cloud provider…trying to manage five or six different people to figure out what’s going on with your backups.”
In 2015, NIC Partners brought on Unitrends as a BCDR partner to offer the simplified, cost-effective and reliable solution their clients were looking for.
“Unitrends is a one-stop shop,” explains Radadia. “They’re one umbrella. If you have any issues, you’ve got one person to talk to. All of my customers sleep better knowing Unitrends is backed up locally [and] in the cloud, and they can spin it up in no time.”
“One of the things that was unique with Unitrends was support for the Cisco UCS platform,” says Radadia. “As a big Cisco reseller, our customers love the feature that actually backs up the profile(s) with Unitrends. If they had an issue with UCS, that profile was backed up as well. No one else is able to do that.”
Follow Up
In 2015, NIC Partners brought on Unitrends as a BCDR partner to offer the simplified, cost-effective and reliable solution their clients were looking for.
“Unitrends is a one-stop shop,” explains Radadia. “They’re one umbrella. If you have any issues, you’ve got one person to talk to. All of my customers sleep better knowing Unitrends is backed up locally [and] in the cloud, and they can spin it up in no time.”
NIC is a Cisco partner who delivers various collaboration solutions for many of their clients, especially in the education sector. Unitrends ability to back up and recover Cisco UCS data, including Service Profile metadata, provided NIC with a differentiated offering tailor-made to support one of their largest practices.
“One of the things that was unique with Unitrends was [support for] Cisco UCS platforms,” says Radadia. “As a big Cisco reseller, our customers love the feature that actually backs up the profile(s) with Unitrends. If they had an issue with UCS, that profile was backed up as well. No one else is able to do that.”
Radadia and the NIC team are well-versed in Unitrends’ solutions from a technological standpoint. Their ability to convey value and deliver tangible results for their clients with Unitrends has helped scale their backup practice tremendously.
“[There’s been] a huge ROI and a huge impact in our sales on backup solutions,” explains Radadia. “I never sold backup until we got to tell the Unitrends story. In the K-12 community, that has resonated with them… especially the price point, the protection and even checking for cybersecurity issues.”
Radadia and the NIC team utilize the Unitrends Partner Portal to maximize their efficiency with their day-to-day aspects of the partnership.
“The portal’s really great,” says Radadia. “I can get learning done, I can get registrations done with a few clicks and also get collateral and updates on new releases and promotions. It’s all on one dashboard, so I don’t have to go and find a bunch of emails.”
They’re also leveraging the portal to grow their knowledge of IT Complete, enabling them to leverage complimentary solutions to solve a variety of partner challenges.
“Lately, Unitrends has added some other features that’s made it simple to talk about additional things. If you want to discuss IT Glue or Spanning SaaS Backup, we’re able to easily add those other features into our notes so we can talk about those things with our customers. Having some things that are complimentary, like Helix, our customers love that as well. It gives them visibility and [we’re] able to share some of the other products under the umbrella.”
As the Unitrends-NIC partnership has grown, Radadia and NIC have built a great cadence with their dedicated Unitrends team to lay the foundation for mutual success.
“One of my favorite things is when we have a customer demo,” Radadia explains. “We have a great team that does these. Once I get [the customer] onboarded, the Unitrends team can take over.”
“I think the ‘wow’ factor with Unitrends compared to all the other technologies we sell is the team process of how everybody works together.”
“The technology keeps improving,” Radadia continues, “and if we have an issue of where we need things to be, to get a ticket escalated, I can pick up the phone, text people and I get responses. I reach out to any one of my Unitrends connections and they’ll be able to help.”
