While the company’s StorageX storage management platform is a mature product, Data Dynamics itself is a three year old startup, and is just now completing building out the channel program it wants.
Sean McCarry, VP of Worldwide Sales at Data Dynamics
Teaneck N.J.-based Data Dynamics has announced its Data Dynamics Advantage Partner Program, which pretty much amounts to a complete revamp of the program it previously had in place. It has a much richer set of benefits than the original program, including elements like deal registration which were not in the original program at all. The new program, which represents a much larger investment by Data Dynamics in the channel, is designed to reward creators of partner-led solutions utilizing the StorageX platform.
“This is a considerable enhancement to the old program,” said Sean McCarry, VP of Worldwide Sales at Data Dynamics. “A key change and a key objective is to reward the partners who invest in the development of solutions on the StorageX platform. The heart of the program is that if partners are prepared to invest in the technology with service as well as sales, the greater the return they will see.”
The StorageX platform software is an automated-policy based mobility solution designed to help NAS based migrations to next-generation hardware platforms, while significantly reducing both time and costs.
“The technology was developed in 2002 by NuView,” McCarry said. “Brocade acquired them in 2006 and ceased development of the product in 2012. We then acquired it in 2012. We have a proven enterprise class technology, and the growth of the marketplace for unstructured data now makes this product a market leader.”
McCarry indicated that the revamp of the program is to make StorageX’s vendor support equal to its technology.
“We want to ensure it’s seen as a high margin technology product,” he said. “This market for unstructured data is an unaddressed problem that’s very actively focused on by customers, but it needs a program that protects margins for partners who invest.”
McCarry said that the new program represents a surge of investment by Data Dynamics into the partner system to provide enablement services and marketing plans and sales enablement. It also offers special discounts to partners that invest in training their resources on the StorageX platform, and gives greater rewards to partners who are both technically and sales enabled. The program has three tiers, as it did before, but McCarry said the discount structure has been improved.
The program also now has deal registration for the first time.
“Even though our software goes back to 2002, Data Dynamics is a three year old startup, and while deal registration is commonplace in larger corporations, it is not as common in startups,” McCarry said.
He indicated that the decision was made to add it at this time because of the growth in channel business.
“We are driving more business to the partner ecosystem, which is now close to 80 per cent of our business,” McCarry stated. “This is why deal registration has come in, because we have more partners coming to us to add us to their solution stack.”
McCarry added that the program is designed to help the partners develop the stack solution and sell it themselves.
“While we get involved with the very large enterprise customers, the program is designed to help the partners sell it, since they are in a trusted relationship with the enterprise customers and provide a stack solution with us being a part of that,” he said.
“We have 15 core partners, and while the goal of the program isn’t to bring in more partners, we are seeing demand increase on a monthly basis, so it will have the effect of supporting our existing partners and helping attract new partners as well.”
