On the heels of signing a significant distribution deal with Ingram Micro, Cloudistics has launched a channel program to support their growing partner base.
Christopher Myhill, Cloudistics’ Vice President, Worldwide Marketing, Channel Sales
Reston VA-based Cloudistics, which provides an hyperscale cloud experience with all resources on-prem, has launched Accelerate, their first channel program.
Cloudistics was formed in 2013 to create a solution with the feel of AWS, but where the resources are all on-prem. This gives the customers complete control over the resources, and also cuts costs in areas like Dev/ops significantly compared to the public clouds.
In August, Cloudistics announced their first distribution deal, with Ingram Micro, and that prompted a surge in interest from prospective channel partners.
“We got quite a bump from that,” said Christopher Myhill, Cloudistics’ Vice President, Worldwide Marketing, Channel Sales. Quite a few channel partners came to us because of the differentiated solution that we provide – almost 100 in the last eight weeks. It has led to 140 deals and $25 million of pipeline just in the last five weeks.”
That surge of interest is being addressed with the Accelerate program, which has separate, customized tracks for the company’s VAR, MSP, and Technology Alliance Partners.
“The Technology Alliance partners like Red Hat, Splunk and Kubernetes want to learn more about our marketplace, and they also have partners of their own who want to align with us,” Myhill said. “We are really looking to align ourselves with boutique VARs, who are really focused on specific workloads. If, for instance, they have a practice dedicated to Splunk, we can spin up those instances for them in minutes, so they can focus their customer activities on higher margin consulting work around what Splunk does.”
The Technology Alliance Partner [TAP] component has two sub-programs, the Cloudistics OEM Program. And the Cloudistics ISV Program.
Dan Mroz, Director of Channel and Alliances at Cloudistics
“The OEM Program is structured to let partners build and sell a packaged, appliance-based solution,” said Dan Mroz, Director of Channel and Alliances at Cloudistics.
The ISV Program provides access to the Cloudistics Marketplace
“The marketplace is really a ‘bring your own license’ environment,” Mroz said. “The partners can stack us with their software titles, and also build bundle with other professional services like migration from VMware or installations.”
Mroz also stressed that the technology also really lends itself to MSPs, which is why they have their own component within the partner program.
“There are two options for MSPs,” he said. “One is ReadyCloud, a pay-as-you-go offering on a utility model. The other, StarterCloud, is a more customized solution on our cloud platform where we white-glove the program for the partner.”
Myhill said that while some national and regional VARs are showing interest – and that they are in discussions with several of them – the boutique VARs who focus on offering differentiated, cutting-edge solutions are a really good fit for them at this stage.
“For the larger VARs, we tend to fit into more of what they would consider to be emerged markets,” he said. “We are seeing more success with the boutique VARs as far as early wins.
One such partner is Vancouver B.C.-based Tuangru, a solution provider that makes next-generation data center infrastructure management [DCIM] software.
Risto Ylivainio, SVP Business Development at Cloudistics partner Tuangru
“We are heavily focused on new technology,” said Risto Ylivainio, Tuangru’s SVP Business Development.” It gives us a very beneficial competitive advantage over the traditional data centre vendors.”
“It is harder for partners to differentiate their offerings if they are using the same products from Cisco, HPE and Dell EMC as their competitors,” Myhill said. “Customers gravitate to AWS because of its ease of use. We focus on delivering that on-prem, and providing that experience opens up new revenue streams for partners.”
Myhill said that Cloudistics has placed a high priority in making the program extremely simple for partners to work with.
“The portal processes all the enablement, including collateral, certification, and deal registration,” he said. “We have seen onramps of one day, where the partner was then able to business with Cloudistics. We place a major focus on understanding the goals of each partner.”
