Storage connectivity vendor ATTO Technology has announced that it has expanded its distribution deal with Tech Data to include Canada, part of a bid to reach out to different types of solution providers.
Under the deal, Tech Data Canada partners will have access to ATTO’s lineup of Host Bus Adapters, RAID Adapters and controllers, NICs, bridges and switches.
The company has worked with Ingram Micro and Avnet in Canada, and expanded its distribution network in the U.S. to include Tech Data earlier this year.
Wayne Arvidson, vice president of marketing for ATTO, said the Amherst, NY-based company is looking for new solution providers in some of the key markets for its high-performance, low-latency storage and networking gear.
“We’ve long recognized that Canada is a great opportunity in terms of the markets we focus on,” Arvidson said.
Arvidson said along with some of the obvious client attributes ATTO seeks in a partner (long term commitments to both vendors and clients alike), the company is also looking for experts in some of its main opportunities – big networked storage, remote connectivity, and media entertainment companies.
The company also looks for partners with experience with its strategic partners and focuses – including those who’ve work with media production software and hardware from Adobe, Avid Technology, Apple and professional engineering software packages.
“We’re very focused on long-term strategic relationships, and we’re looking for partners who think the same way,” Arvidson said.
The company also provides technology to a variety of manufacturers – Arvidson listed EMC, HP, IBM and NetApp in particular – and works with partners from those companies to expand them into new areas – particularly enterprise-focused partners focused on data centre and infrastructure business. For example, Arvidson said, ATTO can help partners already working with major broadcasters to add the content delivery part of the business to their existing practice in the data centre.
“That’s a strong strategic reason to engage with us,” he said. “These are great opportunities for the reseller community to go after, not just with the ATTO product, but by selling way more storage in a market they may not have been able to attack previously.”
The company also sees opportunity in some of the major verticals that require high-performance computing: medical, oil and gas and visual simulation. Because the company’s products allow workstations to directly connect to enterprise storage, Arvidson said it has a particularly strong value proposition for many of those verticals, especially areas like oil and gas where seismic analysis and other data-intensive workflows tend to be workstation-centric.
