The two companies have worked before in EMEA, but this expanded partnership will impact other geos, including North America.
Jan Sobieszczanski, Storware’s CEO
Polish-based backup and recovery vendor Storware and Austin TX-based hyperconverged and edge solutions player Scale Computing have announced an extension of their existing partnership. The companies have been working for the last two years in EMEA, particularly the German-speaking DACH region. The extended partnership includes Storware’s emphasis on more deeply penetrating the North American market, where they have had a presence for years, but still see lots of room to increase it.
The partnership enables a fast, reliable, and efficient solution for backup that allows organizations to deploy and manage hundreds of locations efficiently with cloud-like orchestration. It is aimed at both the enterprise and the SMB markets. Storware provides a stable, agent-less, certified solution, providing data protection services for virtual machines running on the Scale Computing Platform.
“It has been almost 10 years from our starting point,” said Jan Sobieszczanski, Storware’s CEO. “We decided after a few months of starting up to build backup for virtual, starting with Citrix and then Red Hat for KVM. We started selling just within Poland, but it wasn’t enough, so we decided to go west and to North America, and we started cooperation with Catalogic in NY.” Catalogic makes a management layer to administer all the copy functions of storage arrays — snapshots, replication and clones.
“They invested some money in us, and we are still cooperating,” Sobieszczanski said. “Catalogic was addressing Canada and the U.S., and they had our OEM version.”
In 2018, Storware expanded its partnering with North American companies further.
“We signed our first contract with IBM for developing part of Spectra Protect Plus Services for Microsoft 365 – the Microsoft 365 backup pass, and we are in their IBM Passport Advantage and they resell us,” Sobieszczanski indicated. In 2018, we also signed with Dell EMC.”
Storware’s market is somewhat diffuse, covering much of the market.
“We were one of the first, with Commvault, to use OpenStack, and with OpenStack you start to talk with enterprises,” Sobieszczanski stated. “That would make it hard to say that we covered SMB only. We sell cross-sector and across all sizes of companies, although we do have a lot of large customers. We differentiate ourselves by delivering a very quick response and helping on bug fixing and future requests. We also offer much better pricing, which is extremely simplified. In addition, only Trillium is a real competitor on OpenStack today and the rest are all behind us.”
The channel is not that large for the breadth of geos that they cover.
“We have 150 business partners across the globe, covering 142 countries,” Sobieszczanski said. “We are particularly trying to grow in North America in terms of channel and the number of customers.”
Scale is only the most recent of a significant number of strategic partners for Storware, which reflects the fact that they are a smaller organization.
“We are 70 plus people – not a big company,” Sobieszczanski indicated. “That is why we decided to partner with big and smaller companies, and that is why have a lot of friends, like Wasabi, Backblaze, and Virtue Technologies. There is a lot of them. This increases the number of business partners we have as well.”
Scale Computing originally focused on hyperconverged computing for the SMB market and over recent years they have placed a strong bet on the edge, and made more efforts to penetrate the enterprise. Their first major enterprise deal, with a European grocery chain, came through a strategic partnership with Lenovo.
The Scale-Storware deal also started in Europe.
“It came about through a contact of my CTO with a Scale EMEA manager two years ago,” Sobieszczanski said. “We had some interesting discussions which led to the start of a relationship in EMEA, particularly the DACH region. We are now extending that.”
He also noted that a key plus that Storware brings to the table with Scale is extreme flexibility in selecting the optimal backup strategy, the ability to store data in multiple locations, and fast data recovery.
“These all make us a good fit for Scale,” he added. “We are aggressive and more flexible in our projects.”
