The integration from the new partnership will both reduce customer costs and increase partner profitability, and in addition to the integration, there is also a Go-To-Market component.
Quest Software and cloud storage startup Wasabi have announced a new partnership, with an integration that sees Wasabi’s cloud storage become accessible directly through the QoreStor interface. This smoother connection speeds up backup performance and disaster recovery.
Quest’s QoreStor is a software-defined dedupe solution, which is typically coupled with a backup solution, either one of Quest’s, or another backup vendor. Veeam is a commonly used third party backup with QoreStor. While Quest was part of Dell, they sold QoreStor in two forms, software and as a physical DR appliance.
“After the divestment from Dell, we made the decision to decouple the software from the hardware in the appliance and take that to market, to provide it with a greater level of flexibility,” said John O’Boyle, Director of Marketing and Channels at Quest Software, “It is complementary both with our own backup solutions and third party ones, with its Go-to-Market focus being to make other things better – to reduce the volume of data, compress it down, and allow it to be moved and recovered faster.”
Most of QoreStor sales go through channel partners, as is the case for the entire Quest data protection business.
“Data protection is a channel driven market,” O’Boyle said. “We are absolutely a channel-first and channel-driven business, that is over 90% channel. “In addition, the beauty of QoreStor is that it really does scale from the SMB to the enterprise. We have a high volume of small customers as well as some very large ones, and the sweet spot is probably the midmarket.”
The new partnership with Wasabi also plays on QoreStor’s strengths as a complementary solution, and continues Quest’s strategy of entering into strategic partnerships around QoreStor.
“The nature of the product makes other things better, so it makes a lot of sense to partner with third party vendors,” O’Boyle indicated. “We have multiple vendor partnerships, but a few of them are really strategic relationships – and this would be one of those. It’s not just certifying that we work well together. It accelerates the technical integration, and reduces the number of clicks to get things done, but it goes beyond that and is also a Go-to-Market partnership.”
Wasabi’s service has been available since May 2017, and provides a universal single-tiered cloud object storage service at a disruptive TB per month price, which can be as much as 80% below market norms. There are no costs for the egress of data or API requests, and the single tier of storage results in very fast access times.
“The Wasabi partnership was really a perfect storm,” O’Boyle said. “We noticed them as they popped up at more and more events, and looked at them closely. Their focus on simplifying cloud storage had a lot of commonality with QoreStor, which is focused on trying to do the same thing. We both recognized that common theme, so there was a joint interest. Our customers also mentioned them as a cloud platform, and there had been collaboration between account managers on both sides.”
The integration enables Wasabi as a cloud tier option directly in the QoreStor user interface, allowing customers to deduplicate data, and compress and encrypt data using QoreStor before sending the data to Wasabi’s storage user interface.
“Customers will save significantly on storage costs, and will also be able to move data around faster and more easily,” O’Boyle said. “They will also see more simplicity when it comes to cloud storage and backup.”
Partners will benefit from the integration because there is strong demand for this kind of trusted solution, O’Boyle added.
“It will also help them to be more profitable,” he said. “They will be able to offer a better solution at a lower cost to them and to their customers. Some MSPs and CSPs will also use this themselves to reduce their own costs.”
