Zerto, which sells entirely through partners, is expanding its routes to market with this deal, which it expects will be only the first of multiple such major initiatives.
Mehran Hadipour, Zerto’s Director of Business Development
Availability and disaster recovery vendor Zerto has announced an expansion of its relationship with HPE. Zerto’s flagship product, Zerto Virtual Replication, will be sold by HPE to provide business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities for HPE Helion CloudSystem solutions. For Zerto, it’s the first of multiple upcoming strategic partnerships that the company expects will expand its routes to market.
Zerto’s own go-to-market route uses a 100 per cent channel strategy, across multiple channels.
“Because we are software, we can enable a lot of modes of consumption,” said Mariah West, Director, Global Partner Marketing at Zerto. “Traditional channel resellers and system integrators purchase us as software, usually for private cloud deployments. Cloud service providers use us at a service.” West said that Zerto has about 1500 channel partners of its own, of which about 1100 are traditional resellers and SIs and the rest cloud service providers.
The extended relationship with HPE has the potential to broaden this base significantly.
“It is a succession to some work we had already been doing with HPE,” said Mehran Hadipour, Zerto’s Director of Business Development. Last year we did some integration with HPOO [HP Operations Orchestration software] and this current announcement extends that relationship.”
HPE Helion CloudSystem is an integrated hardware and software solution for hybrid cloud that lets customers move traditional apps to the cloud and build cloud native apps with rapid infrastructure provisioning and management. Its history to date has not been crowned with success. The company did, however, introduce Helion CloudSystem 10 last June at the HPE Discover event, and are optimistic about its prospects.
“Helion has been remapped several times, but HPE has a lot of hope for the current CloudSystem 10,” Hadipour said. The integration of Zerto protects HPE Helion CloudSystem applications and data, while improving business continuity and disaster recovery for private and hybrid cloud environments on VMWare, Microsoft Hyper-V, and AWS. Zerto for HPE Helion CloudSystem provides a recovery point objective of seconds and a recovery time objective of minutes and failover automation for applications.
“HPE also has a significant base of previous cloud systems that need to be upgraded, and we hope to benefit from CloudSystem 10 adoption there,” Hadipour said. “We expect a good revenue stream with this. Also, because we are now an HPE partner, we can work with them on non-cloud systems as well, which will be to our advantage.”
Mariah West, Director, Global Partner Marketing at Zerto
While the Zerto Virtual Replication product has been integrated into CloudSystem 10, and HPE will sell it as their own part number through their own channel, the Zerto branding is still there, which will also help their business.
“It’s really more of an integrated resell,” Hadipour said.
“Part of our promise to our channel is to help them become strategic consultants on resiliency, and this kind of partnership where we work with a major vendor will help them there,” West said.
It’s not likely to be the last such initiative either.
“We have some interesting news with IBM coming up as well,” Hadipour stated. “We hope that HPE and IBM are just the start of this type of strategic relationship.”
HPE Helion CloudSystem 10 will be available with Zerto Virtual Replication BC/DR software starting September 26, 2016.
