Brennan sees the channel as critical to accelerating the success of their new midmarket-focused Artesca solution, and thinks some things can be done to the Go-to-Market generally which will pour more gas on the fire.

Distributed file and object storage vendor Scality has announced that former HPE executive Peter Brennan has been named the company’s new Chief Revenue Officer. While Scality has always been a relatively channel-friendly company, Brennan is looking to scale growth by deepening that further, with more joint planning relationships rather than simply ‘meet in the channel’ ones. Brennan also sees the channel as critical to the effective leveraging of Scality’s newly introduced Artesca solution, which is aimed more at the midmarket rather than the large enterprise where Scality has traditionally sold.

Scality was one of the pioneers in the object storage industry, which kicked off in the last decade with expectations of great things. But the market provided slower to develop than expected, which compelled some contemporaries of Scality like Swiftstack and Caringo to sell to larger companies. Scality has persevered however.

“I think three things are responsible for this,” Brennan said. “First, the technology itself is very strong. This company has helped large enterprises resolve large IT issues, as well as business issues.”

Brennan also identified Scality’s culture as distinct and positively differentiating.

“The culture is laser focused on making sure that everything keeps the client in mind, first and forefront,” he said. “As a partner of theirs when I was at HPE, I would be on joint calls with the customer and so would their CEO, Jerome LeCat. Jerome has run an amazing organization, and I have been impressed with the culture he has built.”

Brennan also said that Scality has had a consistent partner-first strategy, something that has not been consistent in the object storage space overall.

“It’s not just vendor partners like HPE, but VARS and integrators as well,” he stated.

Ring, an enterprise offering for very large customers, is Scality’s legacy product. However, the introduction last year of Scality’s Artesca technology broadens their TAM considerably.

“Artesca is enterprise grade, but it is targeted more at data on the edge and addresses the needs of the midmarket,” Brennan said. “It’s a sweet spot for partners where they can add on their services and lead with their consulting.”

Brennan noted that this broadening out was visible in Veeam’s recent Veeam Data Platform launch.

“At the Veeam launch, we were named as one of only two object storage partners, and this was around Artesca,” Brennan indicated. “People didn’t know what to do in this market. They started out putting things into the cloud, thinking that will solve it. Now this is being re-evaluated. On the backup side with Veeam, bundling us in makes it easy to see value, and ROI is important.”

Brennan spent the last four years at HPE as Vice President & Managing Director, a suitably broad-named position that could mean almost anything.

“What I did was lead two-thirds of the United States,” he said. “I had a two billion team quota and managed between 350 and 500 people, leading the  Go-to-Market strategy and directing technical channel specialists. I also led the transition to consumption-based selling in this area consistent with HPE’s strategy around GreenLake.”

Brennan has only been at Scality a week, and even though the company already has a strong channel history, he thinks that more can be done there to make both partners and Scality more profitable.

“My goal is to advance partners to a new level, and that will be my major focus from Day One,” he said. “Partners will be critical in Artesca. My goal is to be entirely partner only, and I think I can bring in best practices that will add miles per gallon. Scality has always been a channel company, but we can pour more gas on the fire. Some of the channel business has just been ‘meet in the channel,’ through triangulation with HPE and others. However, when we plan and engage with partners, our partner registrations go through the roof. We need to be stronger here, given that our partners have options based on their other relationships, and that other vendors have announced in last few weeks that they are getting into object.

“I also really want a consistent marketing idea of rolling thunder, where we don’t have multiple messages going to the market,” Brennan stressed.

While it is still early days, Brennan also wants to ramp up the focus on integrators in the Scality partner ecosystem.

“SIs play a key part with us,” he said. “We have some great wins with integrators who want to do more with us – and we want this to be heard more in the market.”