The distribution agreement formalizes a working agreement which began around the companies’ mutual relationship with ConnectWise, and while this one is for Canada only, a U.S. one is coming soon.
Omry Farajun, Storage Guardian’s President
Toronto-based backup and disaster recovery provider Storage Guardian has signed its first distribution deal, with Ingram Micro, specifically around the Ingram Micro Cloud. It covers their full portfolio of data protection and disaster recovery offerings. While this particular deal applies to Ingram Micro Canada, the expectation is that it will soon be extended to the United States – where Storage Guardian does 80 per cent of its business.
“This is our first formal distribution agreement,” said Omry Farajun, Storage Guardian’s President. “We have a significant relationship with ConnectWise and their RMM and PSA channels, and we began working with Ingram Micro through ConnectWise. Because both Ingram and us service the same ConnectWise ecosystem, and because we have a deep integration with ConnectWise, we naturally are fulfilling a lot of demands through them. This agreement connects the dots and formalizes the relationship, allowing Ingram Micro broad network of partners in Canada to leverage the power of distribution to easily consume cloud services.”
In business for 18 years, Storage Guardian has about 5000 channel partners, of whom about 80 per cent are in the U.S. and 20 per cent in Canada. They are looking to Ingram Micro to help manage the lead flow that Storage Guardian generates.
“Storage Guardian is generating a lot of leads that we can’t fulfil, and we need the channel to help fill them,” Farujan said. “Through our Web site and campaigns that we are running, we generate a couple of hundred leads a day, which is critical because it’s typically so expensive to generate leads. We need the channel to close that business. We need distribution to help manage the lead flow. Every MSP out there is looking for their next managed service contract. They can take these leads and they can sell a managed services contract around it. They just need to reach out to their Ingram reps.”
Farujan also said that the formal Ingram Micro relationship will assist their channel partners to sell a broader range of services.
“Backup is just the entry point,” he said. “We want them to get into HyperV, VMware, Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, which are much higher value, and which we can help them develop through the relationship with Ingram.”
The formalized relationship will also see Storage Guardian available on Ingram Micro’s Odin platform for the first time.
“We expect to see this happen within the next couple of months,” Farujan said.
In addition to this expanded fulfilment capacity that comes from the formal relationship with Ingram Micro, Farujan said Storage Guardian is also looking to the relationship with the distributor to build other relationships with some of the distributor’s most significant partners – the major large account resellers [LARs] who operate in the U.S. and Canada.
“We do not do business with these companies today, and we would very much like to,” Farujan said. “These are the types of business we want to reach, because they are a natural outlet to fulfill these orders. We hope that our mutual business with Ingram will lead to us making headway with these partners, and the creation of relationships there.”
Storage Guardian has data centres in both Canada and the U.S., so can satisfy customers on both sides of the border concerned about data sovereignty.
“We recently fulfilled a Canadian order through Ingram for a company which did legal business, where the Canadian data centre was a top priority for them,” Farujan said. “We allow our partners to pick which country they want data to reside in.”
The U.S. data centre presence should assist at a future point when the Ingram relationship is expanded into the U.S.
“We want to focus on the Canadian agreement and see it do well first,” Farujan said. “Then we hope to expand it to the U.S., probably within the year.”
