The Blancco relationship is active now in the U.S., but the Canadian channel will have to wait a little while as final touches are being put on an agreement with Ingram Micro Canada.
Matt Sturges, Blancco VP Sales – North America, and Global Channel
Blancco Technology Group has expanded their relatively new channel reach in North America, signing a distribution agreement with Ingram Micro that covers the U.S. A similar agreement with Ingram Micro Canada is in the process of being finalized.
Blancco has been in business for 20 years, was founded in Finland, sells in 16 countries worldwide, and is publicly traded. They provide organizations with a hardware and software platform for data erasure, including a digitally signed, tamper-proof certificate that verifies that sensitive data has been permanently erased and cannot be recovered. Their core market is regulated industries, and their audit trail is designed to satisfy many such regulations, including PCI DSS, HIPAA, EU GDPR, ISO 27001 and NIST 800-53.
“North America provides about 40 per cent of the total revenue for the company,” said Matt Sturges, who runs both Blancco’s direct sales business in North America and their global channel. “We have been in North America for a while, but mainly on the direct side. North America was really the last place where we established a channel, and that started in 2017.”
While Blancco’s direct sales is all about selling a platform, and not a services business, resellers use Blancco’s Erasure-as-a-Service [EaaS] software to provide a service – a service few of them have had access to previously.
“For most of our partners, this is a brand new route to market,” Sturges said. “I presented to 25 MSPs last week at an event, and they were excited at the prospect of being able to offer EaaS.”
The EU’s GDPR and its ‘right to be forgotten’ is likely to stimulate business, since any company that does business in the EU will be affected.
“Our strategy around EaaS is a great opportunity for solution providers to help deliver a best of breed solution with Blancco secure erasure solutions, to ensure the data is properly erased as well as to provide the audit trail for their customers,” Sturges said. “By delivering our erasure best practices in the way of training and certification to the Ingram Micro partner community, we can enable our partners to deliver the required solution to their customers to ensure compliance with the stringent EU policies.”
Blancco presently has 19 active partners in North America, including some large account resellers like Insight and CDW. They are looking for Ingram Micro to introduce them to quality new partners, but Sturges stressed that he isn’t looking to sign up a ton of new resellers.
“I don’t want the shotgun approach,” he said. “I don’t want to be one of a million solutions that a partner takes to market. I want to find a few strong partners with practices in mid to large enterprises that don’t have erasure-as-a-service, where partnering will be a win-win for both of us.”
Blancco has had a long-standing relationship with Ingram Micro in New Zealand, but that’s been it up to now, as they have been using other distributors in other regions. In North America, they also use Carahsoft for distribution, and that will continue.
“Carahsoft is very strong in government business,” Sturges said. “We are looking to Ingram Micro to help use elevate the corporate business more.”
Blancco is now part of Ingram’s Emerging Vendors program, and Sturges believes that they are the only vendor in the data erasure space on Ingram’s line card.
“Being part of this program gets us nice white glove treatment from the Ingram team, and we are investing in marketing plans that will get us more exposure,” Sturges said. “Ingram will help us identify partners in the right regions.”
Canada is a region that Sturges described as basically a green fields situation for the channel.
“Most of our business in Canada has been direct,” he said. “We have worked with a few small partners there, but no one is doing any proactive selling Canada and all of the deals that have gone through the channel in Canada has been through our Authorized program. Our channel focus until now has been on the U.S. Ideally, I would like to have strong partners in the key regions in Canada, and particularly in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.”
