The introduction of their Acuity platform last year has deepened Pivot3 presence in the enterprise, which has in turn led them to strengthen their technology partnerships which address this space.

Hyperconverged infrastructure provider Pivot3 has made multiple announcements which expand their Technology Alliance partnerships. They have expanded relationships with Zerto and VMware. They also announced an agreement with Redington Value, a distributor which will integrate a bundled solution with Splunk and Malwarebytes in the Middle East and Africa.

Pivot3 sells entirely through channel partners, and their vendor alliance relationships play a key role in their go-to-market strategy, particularly since the introduction of their enterprise-focused Acuity platform last year.

“It’s a major part of our strategy,” said Mike Koponen, Pivot3 senior director of product and solutions marketing. “That strategy is very use case and solution-oriented. HCI is horizontal infrastructure with features and functions that have a lot of use cases, but to be a complete solution we partner with others. In some cases the customer may already have a solid relationship with some of these Technology Alliance Partners, so it behooves us to work with them. It means not only making sure our technology interoperates, but also providing the customer with the documentation that shows what the customer can achieve with the collaboration.”

Pivot3 presently has about 15 Tier One alliance partners.

“They represent different use cases where go to market,” Koponen said. This includes VMware and Citrix in VDI, Microsoft with SQL Server, Splunk in business intelligence, and a variety of partners in the video management space, both management companies and camera manufacturers.

“The Acuity platform has brought in new strategic partners,” he added. “Acuity has moved us upmarket more from where we played in the market before. Splunk would be a good example that shows this kind of impact. It’s a newer relationship for us, and selling into that use case is newer. Our NVMe flash is well suited to its use cases around search.”

“The Splunk infrastructure is pretty complex, and Acuity can simplify that,” said Vikram Belapurkar, Senior Manager, Product and Solutions Marketing at Pivot3. “It’s the same in virtual desktops. We are pushing our platform into more enterprise use cases, so we are running into those situations more often.”

“The enterprise interest in Acuity will lead us to more validations and relationships with new enterprise-oriented vendor partners going forward,” Koponen said.

Zerto resilience offers combines availability and disaster recovery, and was recently enhanced to provide bidirectional replication to and from both the AWS and Azure clouds.

“Pivot3’s Zerto relationship was based around providing core VM level application for our N5 storage arrays and HCI,” Koponen said. “But with Acuity, we have seen more adoption in the Cloud Service Provider and Managed Service Provider space. We are now working more with service providers. With those customers, they want to have our HCI infrastructure on-prem and use Zerto to be the VM-level replication on top of it.” Pivot3’s entire solutions portfolio will now also be supported for use with Zerto.

“The priority with Zerto in the go-to-market is enabling the channel partners we have in common,” Koponen said. “We do a mapping of their partners and ours, region by region, and educate them on the joint solution, in terms of things like the customers it plays to, and the joint value proposition. It’s another way for our sales teams to reach out to our Zerto counterparts.”

The VMware announcement is also an extension of an existing relationship.

“We have had a long-standing relationship with them,” Koponen said. “Our HCI product is VMware ESXi-based, and we are a long-standing OEM of theirs. We were one of their first partners in their longstanding Rapid Desktop Deployment program for validated appliances.”

The expanded VMware relationship makes VMware’s Horizon 7 available on Pivot3 HCI.

“We now have a reference architecture for VMware Horizon 7 for the Acuity platform, and a sizing guide, which allows our solution architects and our channel partners to know how to size it for the needs of Horizon.”

“We have about 2-3 times the density of any competing HCI vendor which brings down the cost of the whole deployment,” Belapurkar said.

“Our reference architecture is for a 3-node flash deployment supporting 1000 knowledge workers,” Koponen said. “A competing vendor takes 8 nodes to support that same number. We can support more users per node, because our performance drives higher density.”

The go-to-market with VMware partners will be similar to the Zerto one, although Koponen noted that there is a very high overlap of Pivot3 partners with VMware partners.

“Because we are an OEM of theirs, we have this on our price list as well,” he said.

The Redington Value component of the announcement will have no direct component to North America, because the distributor works in the Middle East and Africa. They will now offer an all-in-one analytics platform supported by Pivot3 bundled with Splunk and Malwarebytes to address business analytics and IT security use cases.

“They are putting together bundles which position Acuity around analytics use cases,” Belapurkar said. “We perform the Splunk validation to help out the partner.”

Belakurpar indicated that while this particular bundle is only outside North America, similar kinds of bundles through distribution are quite likely to come to fruition in both North America and Europe.

“We would like to see this type of thing be available more broadly,” he said.