Optiv9, a 2022 rebranding of Canadian IaaS firm HostedBizz, has just begun an important new strategic relationship with Backblaze, which just got underway January 1
Cory Mac Donell, Vice President of Sales & Business Development at Opti9
Cloud solutions provider Opti9, which is based in the U.S., but which has just opened a new data region in Canada, is working hard to strengthen its partnership with BackBlaze. This partnership will see Opti9 become the exclusive Canadian channel for Backblaze B2 Reserve and the Powered by Backblaze program.
Backblaze has been active in the object storage market for years, well before the object storage market took off.
“We have been in this market for about 17 years,” said. Cory Mac Donell, Vice President of Sales & Business Development at Opti9 in the Greater Ottawa Metropolitan Area
“We have always had a strong channel presence in this space.
In its earlier years, Backblaze focused on the lower part of the market at a time when the object storage market was much more of a hard sell. Things have changed, however, and Optiv has undergone a new set of strategic goals in which their relatively new partnership with Backblaze enhances their value proposition
‘We have opened up new markets focused much more on high performance, which lets us consolidate our sales strategy outside hyperscalers,” Mac Donell said. “ We are able to offer a better price per unit compared to the hyperscalers. We are able to offer a clearly defined price per unit. We are able to open up new markets which lets us consolidate our sales strategy outside hyperscale.”
While Optiv started out as a commodity end user, Mac Donell emphasized that their solutions have become more complex over time.
“We have been able to build more best of breed workflows once we get more sophisticated,” he said.
Opti9 has a 12 to 13 month exclusivity window for distribution proper, About 4 PB of the data is net new.
“This level of partnership is very strategic,” McDonnell said. “It is a significant enhancement to our existing sales motion, in which we are now placing a strong focus on MSPs.
The Opti9 partnership relies on Backblaze’s B2 cloud storage platform, which went live in 2016. In 2021, Backblaze went public and it became clear at that point that B2, which is object storage, was their marquee product.
Opti9’s strong Canadian presence dates from their 2022 acquisition of Canadian IaaS provider HostedBizz, an award-winning Veeam partner. an award-winning Veeam partner which, like Opti9, is now a Veeam platinum service provider
B2 Cloud Storage is secure, compliance-ready, always-hot object storage that is one-fifth the price of traditional cloud storage providers and can be used in any of the solutions Opti9 provides. The regulatory requirements include SOC 1 Type 2, SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and HIPAA.
Opti9 is U.S.-based and has multiple American offices, but they also have an office in Ottawa. They have data centres in North America, Europe, and the APAC region.
Opti9’s exclusive distribution relationship with Backblaze replaces a much more ad hoc system that Backblaze had been using in Canada.
The Opti9 partnership is extremely new, dating from January 1.
