Druva also announced a new partnership with ConnectWise, part of their increased emphasis on building up their platform business.
Dave Packer, Druva’s Vice President, Corporate and Product Marketing
Cloud data protection vendor Druva has announced the appointment of two new executives. Timm Hoyt becomes Druva’s Vice President, Global Channel Sales. Sanjay Katyal becomes Druva’s Vice President, Worldwide Business Development. The hires are especially noteworthy because they represent the allocation of two resources in a role previously held by one person.
“We are investing a lot more on both the channel side and the business development side of the house,” said Dave Packer, Vice President, Corporate and Product Marketing at Druva.
Druva’s original focus was on larger enterprises, and in North America, they sold direct to that market from their inception in 2008. More recently, they added a channel, and have been taking steps to increase its production and its share of Druva’s revenues.
“The channel is now our major growth engine,” Packer said. “It’s where the focus of our business needs to be. We really want our direct team to be focusing on very large enterprise engagements. The channel can sell to those customers as well, but there’s a need for more engagements more broadly in the market.”
Today, approximately 30 per cent of Druva’s business comes through partners, and they are looking to increase that. The channel is definitely more on the value side, rather than a large volume channel. Large account resellers like CDW and SHI play an important role downmarket. Druva also expanded into the MSP space last year.
“We see a big opportunity for the channel with our Phoenix product, which is for physical and virtual servers,” Packer said. “It’s especially interesting for partners because of its applicability to the ROBO market.”
Druva is also looking to increase its strategic relationships.
“We really want to focus more on strategic alliances – not just technical alliances and building out our ecosystem – but allying with the big players,” Packer said. “This includes the big service providers and large SIs, where they have practices in areas like governance where we have invested heavily in the last few years.”
The newly announced relationship with ConnectWise is part of this strategy. Druva has announced a formal integration between its InSync product and ConnectWise business management solutions. Following a one-time set-up in the InSync MSP Portal, MSPs will receive alerts and can automatically generate and resolve support tickets in ConnectWise based on events generated from inSync. MSPs will also be able to streamline the inSync management process around workflows.
“Our investments in the large enterprise side of the business mean we need to build out more platforms,” Packer said. “That’s why ConnectWise is so important for us.” Druva has about 20 such partnerships.
Packer also noted that the lack of Canadian data centre support had been a limitation in the Canadian market, but one which had been remedied by Microsoft’s establishment of its two Canadian data centres earlier this year.
“95 per cent of our business is cloud, so our focus in Canada is in support of the Azure cloud,” Packer said. “We do have a few partners in Canada.”
