DattoCon 2018 roundup: Award wins and exclusive announcements

This week I attended DattoCon 2018 – the first major conference for the recently-combined Datto and Autotask organisations. From arrival at the event in Austin Texas, everything was very well planned as it needed to be with over 2000 attendees from across the world. The biggest DattoCon to date!

This year we had front row seats for the event as part of the Gold VIP Club, in recognition of the work we have been doing with Datto since our partnership started around 2 years ago. Last year we won the EMEA Breakthrough Partner of the Year, which was a fantastic achievement for the team at TSG just a year in. More about this year later.

For those of you who don’t know much about the two organisations, Datto provides a fantastic disaster recovery (DR) solution that allows servers to be quickly spun up in the event of a catastrophic disaster, whether that’s on-premise or in the Datto cloud. Autotask, now under the Datto banner, provides a full ticketing and case management solution alongside Autotask AEM, which we use as our RMM (remote monitoring and management) tool; a critical part of the SystemCare offering from TSG that allows us to detect and respond to incidents as they occur 24/7 (part of our latest enhancement). Read more about SystemCare 247.

Datto has already protected some of our customers from complete disaster; from complete system failures due to a power outage through to major encryption issues caused by Ransomware, Datto provides that key technology. It not only protects critical business data reliably, but allows multiple restore points and provides that continuity solution, so you can keep operational when the worst happens.

From our initial reviews of Datto back in 2016 we knew that Datto provided that missing solution, allowing us to solve both cloud backup and disaster recovery in one simple and affordable solution. The organisation is headed by the original developer and founder Austin McCord who now heads up the combined organisation and has great plans for the ongoing development of the platforms. Read more about Datto or ask us for a demo.

So, onto some of the key highlights from the conference;

Datto’s disaster demo

Of course no Datto conference would be complete without the famous disaster demo. From shooting boxes to freezing them (which Datto has demonstrated at our Futuretech events) or frying them with thermite, this year’s live demo was no exception. Two firefighters came onto the stage and cut the server and then an appliance in half, then recovered virtual machines not once, but twice. Once using the Datto appliance and once using the Datto cloud DR. They were also brave/confident (delete as appropriate) enough to run the presentation from the recovered VMs in the cloud.

New Datto features

Announcement from Austin of a new programme of feature releases for Autotask which will now be quarterly, improving the speed we can bring that innovation through to our flagship SystemCare support and monitoring services.

PC backup virtualisation

We also heard the announcement of a brand-new PC backup solution that will allow full PC virtualisation in the cloud; for example, if you lost a laptop or the hard drive completely failed. This allows end users to be quickly productive again.

Networking and managed power solutions

An update on the networking tools from Datto and a new innovative managed power solution, all of which we will be reviewing for adoption into our TSG solutions offering.

Quicker restores that minimise downtime

A new rapid rollback and enhanced DR solution allowing for even quicker restore processes, again minimizing a business’ downtime and checking all processes will recover correctly in the event the worst happens – for example SQL or Exchange.

Entrepreneurial keynote speeches

We had keynotes from two fantastic speakers in Sir Richard Branson and Robert Herjavec, both amazing entrepreneurs telling their stories of how they made and grew successful businesses and why business culture and customer experience are critically important.

A passionate speech from Datto’s founder

Austin’s (founder of Datto) speech was entertaining and engaging as always and shows the passion he has to drive both Datto and Autotask solutions forward. It’s clear he has one eye on the past and is not losing that spirit on which the company was founded.

Expanding our knowledge and solutions

It was great meeting some fantastic MSPs from around the world and looking at some innovative add-on solutions. In particular we will be following up on a credential theft detection solution and a DR plan creation and testing tool amongst others.

Another Datto award win for TSG

And finally, for us the big one – the announcement of the team at TSG winning the main EMEA Partner of the Year after just 2 years of selling the solution!

 Presented live on the main stage in front of 2,000 other MSPs from around the world by Mark Banfield (VP International Sales), our award will be proudly on show at one of the TSG offices…unless I can persuade Datto to give us 6! This is a great showcase to the hard work all the teams at TSG have put in to making this a success. Here’s a snap of myself and Barry O’Donnell (Service Delivery Director) with our award. You can see more snaps in our news article.

And of course, there was a little time to explore Austin which has a vibrant music scene, great food (for those like me who love BBQ) and some great live bands which provided some much-needed R&R after all day in the conference.

Next time you see me, ask me about armadillo racing, which was a very interesting new sport I was introduced to in Austin!