Schultz Technology

Schultz Technology is a Pennsylvania MSP operating in 48 states, with about 85 percent of its client base in veterinary practices. They previously ran backup on a stack they assembled themselves: backup software, their own on-premise storage appliances, and uncapped cloud storage behind it. Across roughly 250 sites, no single view of the whole estate existed. Moving that fleet to Slide took about six months, gave them that view for the first time, and cut their cloud storage costs by an estimated 20 to 25 percent, because fixed-capacity devices imposed a limit the old stack never had.

A Stack with No Ceiling

Schultz built their own backup stack. Backup software on the endpoints, QNAP appliances on site, and Wasabi behind it for cloud retention.


On paper that is flexible. In practice it meant nothing in the system enforced a limit.


The on-premise appliances did impose one, because a box holds what a box holds. Cloud storage did not.


"There was no cap. It would just keep it until you tell it to stop keeping it."


Licensing worked against predictability too. Their previous platform priced on a points system, where a virtual machine, a physical server and a workstation each consumed a different number of points.


"It was very hard to nail down how much it would be each month."


For an MSP selling on monthly recurring revenue, a cost base that moves every month is not an accounting inconvenience. It is margin you cannot quote against.

Support Measured in Days

The second problem was getting help.


Account managers changed frequently, which Charlie describes as normal across a lot of the products they use. The harder constraint was structural: not everyone on his team was permitted to open a ticket.


When they did get one open, a response took two to three days.


Backup is the one thing in an MSP's stack that only matters on the worst day a client has. A two-day response window is fine right up until the moment it is not.

They Worked Through It

Charlie first came across Slide at a conference, though he cannot say which one, which will be familiar to anyone who does the circuit.


Two things got him to take a device.


"I liked that it was built on an NVMe platform, so I knew it would be faster."


"The people that I met just seemed very engaged and willing to work with me."


Support was not what brought Schultz in. It is what kept them.


"The support is way, way better than what it was last fall. We have no problems with support now, but we had a couple issues in the very beginning. We got through them."

What the Migration Uncovered

The deployment mechanics were straightforward. Serial numbers arrive ahead of the hardware, the device is configured before it ships, and someone on site plugs it in. Most of it happened remotely, with a technician dispatched only when a client preferred a person in the room.


"On the Slide side, it was good. It was pretty easy."


The longer part of the work was on Schultz's side, and it was not a technology problem. Consolidating onto one platform meant seeing the entire estate at once, which backup software plus on-premise appliances plus a separate cloud provider had never allowed.


What that view showed was drift. Retention had grown well past what any of it had been scoped for, because nothing in the old setup raised a hand when it did. Sites provisioned for about a terabyte were carrying 60 to 70 terabytes.


"So many techs had their hands in it that we were just losing money all over the place."


Charlie is even-handed about what the migration was worth.


"It either uncovered more revenue, or it covered holes where we were losing money. Look at it how you wish. It saved us and helped us in both ways."


Any MSP running backup across several tools and a few hundred sites has some version of this sitting in their numbers. The cost is invisible precisely because no single view of it exists.

A Ceiling, on Purpose

The fix was not better discipline. It was a platform that does not allow the drift in the first place.


Schultz's clients now sit mostly on fixed-capacity appliances, and the capacity is the capacity.


"Those don't change. If they have a 2TB box, they can't go over it. Whether they want to go over the 2TB or not, they can't. It honestly keeps us in check."


That constraint is where the savings came from. With uncapped cloud storage, retention grew until somebody noticed. Charlie estimates the change saved 20 to 25 percent on the cloud side of their costs.


He is clear that this is not a revenue story. Per device, Slide was slightly more expensive than what they were running before. It came out ahead anyway, because the previous setup was leaking in ways that never appeared on an invoice.


"I feel like we have more control over everything now."

Recovery Made Faster

Schultz recovers clients more often than most MSPs, and the reason is their vertical.


"In the vet space, it's hard to sell new technology. They just want it to work so they can help their patients. When you try to approach them about upgrading their technology, they're like, we don't really have the budget for that."


Old hardware in production means failures. Schultz has run about eight recoveries on Slide, with three clients running virtualized at the time of this interview.


One of them happened almost immediately.


"We onboarded one, and then a week later their server failed. But it was fantastic. We spun it up and they were back up and running in under an hour."


That client then ran on the Slide appliance for a couple of weeks while replacement hardware was sourced.


"They didn't really complain about performance at all."


They have done both bare metal restores and virtual ones. Bare metal takes longer, but Charlie describes both as relatively fast from where he sits.


On the previous platform, the same work took about three hours longer. He puts a typical restore there at around four hours against roughly one now, and notes the gap varies with the size of the environment.

Built for the Whole Team

The constraint that bothered Charlie most was not speed.


"We only had a couple technicians that really fully understood it. We were kind of handicapped in that way."


Slide ran four separate hour-long training sessions across different days so that every technician who needed to attend could, rather than expecting seventeen people to clear the same hour. All seventeen now work in the console.


The old stack had a quieter failure mode too. Encryption keys lived in house, which meant they were only as reliable as whoever last touched one, and nothing recorded when somebody did.


“We would have problems with guys changing the backups, changing the encryption key, but then never noting it.”

Slide manages key custody by default, and a partner who would rather hold their own keys can. Charlie looked at both and made a deliberate choice.


“That’s why it’s great that you guys actually hold onto them. I know that I could take control of holding onto the encryption key, but honestly, if it’s not in-house, it’s probably better.”

What Charlie Tells Other MSPs

He does not oversell it, and he does not pretend the first few months were clean.