https://www.computerweekly.com/microscope/news/366623903/Innovation-Team-expanding-ADP-horizons
Assured Data Protection (ADP) recently unveiled its innovation team, with a remit to identify vendor partnerships where the MSP could add value around its areas of backup and recovery expertise.
The long-time Rubrik partners kicked off the innovation team with the announcement it was bringing that backup knowledge to Nutanix environments and had made a hire to head the efforts.
Speaking to MicroScope, Rob Mackle, director and co-founder at Assured Data Protection, outlined the ambitions behind the formation of the team and where it was expected to add value to the overall business.
He started by explaining why the innovation team sat in a broader evolution of the business and why the idea of working with other vendors emerged from conversations with customers. “We were founded after seeing the Rubrik technology; we brought all our expertise into data backup, disaster recovery, and in recent years, brought cyber recovery and resiliency into the solution,” said Mackle.
“It was a natural progression for us to step from being a backup and DR [disaster recovery] provider more towards the security side,” he said. “We know the blurred lines now between backup and security; the space is overlapping all the time. Then we started to notice requests from customers around, ‘Can we do more than just backup, and can we do a disaster recovery and enhanced disaster recovery with the Nutanix platform?’”
Mackle said the idea was to work with vendors like Nutanix that offered the chance to take its existing skills and services to expand revenues.
“At Nutanix, disaster recovery is the first thing to be brought into it,” he added. “I’d say the key thing for doing it is that it doesn’t distract from our core Rubrik-powered services today, and that’s important. The innovation team are here to find complementary, adjacent services to our core business today.”
Mackle said it was important to protect its existing relationship with Rubrik and to add value to any other vendors it worked with.
“We’ve been very careful, and we will continue to be very careful as to what type of services we bring on top of the Rubrik-powered ones,” he added. “It’s very clearly defined from the starting relationship, we are going to add big value to Nutanix and the partner ecosystem with this approach.”
Nutanix is the first relationship, but the innovation team will be considering other options going forward, with ADP looking to the operation to start contributing significant revenue to the overall business.
“We have been looking at other things,” said Mackle. “It makes sense to do it, because some things are complementary, and that’s quite easy to do, and some things will be a longer play. We’re also looking well into the future as to what’s the next tech that customers and partners are looking for. So, we’re doing a number of things.
“We are looking ahead, absolutely, and that’s why we have a dedicated team to look forward without disrupting our day-to-day,” he said.
ADP launched the innovation team earlier this month, recruiting Tony Giannini, a seasoned executive from the IT service sector, to lead the initiative.
15 May 2025