Months into her new role as Canadian country manager for storage software vendor FalconStor, Pramila Nair is clear on her main priorities. She’s not necessarily looking to bring on new partners – rather, she’s focused on making sure each of the company’s partners is more successful.

“We’re not trying to have the same size pie and have more people eating that,” she said. “We want to keep the same number of people eating the pie, but grow the pie.”

That means a lot more support for the company’s Canadian partners when it comes to business development. Already, the company has grown to five people supporting the Canadian channel community, with plans to have two or three more people onboard in the coming weeks.

It’s an even split between sales and technical resources across the regions of Canada, Nair said, that is designed make sure the company’s partners can make the most of the opportunity in the market. And Nair says the company’s status as a pure-play storage management software company, without its own storage hardware agenda, puts that opportunity in a unique perspective.

“Canada as a market is a good blend of small business to medium enterprise to some large enterprises,” she said. “The advantage FalconStor has is that we play in the virtual appliance space – we’re the only vendor with multiple paths for partners to go after.”

In other words, the company feels it can meet a variety of partners’ needs, whether those partners are supporting small and medium sized business customers, larger customers who are looking at a co-location opportunity, or even those who are looking to build out their own services or offerings that include storage. The move towards “as-a-service” and the cloud are key opportunities for the company and its partners, Nair said, as its software is a key enabler for storage virtualization.

“As more customers go that route into storage virtualization, they don’t want to be locked in to a particular vendor,” Nari said. “We give them that flexibility, and we give them deduplication capabilities as well.”

In short, as long as the amount of data collected, stored, and analyzed by business keeps growing, Nair feels there are growing opportunities.

And while the goal isn’t to sign up a lot of new partners, Nair said there is room for a few key partners with either key geographic or vertical focuses. But the company isn’t looking to become a big-tent channel community here in Canada. At least not until the pie is much larger than it is today.

“We’re open to welcoming new partners on board when there’s a mutual business relationship that makes sense for us,” Nair said. “But we have amazing relationships with our current partners, and our focus is firmly on growing that.”