Teneros launches hosted Disaster Recovery service 16 February, 2010 By Mark Cox

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"Teneros has been a message infrastructure provider especially around Exchange, and the idea being that messaging applications were always on and always available," said Michael Guglielmi, Teneros' Vice President, Business Development, "But it's more than email now. This provides businesses with assurance of seamless recovery from failures and outages. And it does so at a considerable cost savings over an on-premise solution, at a very competitive per mailbox per month fee."

Teneros' cloud comes from partnering with Tier one providers, but Teneros itself handles the management of the service. Its' dedicated 24X7 monitoring is designed to ensure adequate bandwidth allocation and software management, including updates, patches and compliance enforcement.

Guglielmi said that while their DR as a service should resonate across the entire SMB space, they expect the sweet spot will be in the higher end of that space.

"At the very low end of SMB under 200 the true need for DR is less prevalent, except in certain types of industries like legal, advertising, media and entertainment, where our services sell well, Gugliemi said. "Ánd enterprises typically have DR facilities and use appliances. It's the high end of the SMB which hasn't been able to have a cost effective DR before." In addition to eliminating the need for costly datacenter and hardware deployment, DR-as-a-Service mitigates the ongoing operational costs of managing a DR solution for a business' complete IT infrastructure, eliminating the need for dedicated in-house clustering expertise.

For Teneros, this new offering means a new wrinkle to its' channel model.

"This is a new launch for us with our channel program," Gugliemi said. "Traditionally VARs have sold our appliance model with a year's subscription. But we are looking for different type of VAR for this product. The composite of an appliance-selling VAR is different from a SaaS based solution. We are looking for ones selling managed services with a Microsoft Exchange background. We are also looking for ones with a high concentration of SMB customers, ones who have good relationships in this market."

"We are very excited about this for the channel," Gugliemi said. "We think it will resonate very well, with a compressed sales cycle, high margins and a repeating revenue stream."