A reseller agreement announced last fall with HP led Scality to greatly simplify their software installation, which had previously required Scality to be involved because of the complexity.
Rubrik sees itself as a threat to every backup vendor, with an offering that will focus on the mid-market at first, and will be sold 100 per cent through the channel.
The Federation Business Data Lake greatly expands EMC’s converged Big Data offerings, and while only EMC’s more sophisticated partners will likely be able to sell it, it will be available to them.
The three new partner tiers all have revenue and certification requirements, and most partners will not qualify, but all partners, including those not in a tier, will receive the benefits Nimble has been providing until now, as all the new benefits to the tiers are net-new.
Unlike previous CompTIA tools in this area, this one is focused on business models rather than financials, and is designed to be extremely simple to use
Splunk Light, a new product which is focused on the needs of mid-market companies, smaller than most of Splunk’s traditional customers, will require new partners focused on that area to sell it.
The DataCore-Huawei offerings are targeted at larger customers than the midmarket and lower end of the enterprise where other hyperconverged vendors have been most successful to date.
Nutanix aims to create the equivalent of a Cisco CCIE certification for the hyperconverged world, that will establish its thought leadership, with a demanding certification program that tests the ability to design solutions on multiple hypervisors.
Condusiv’s Diskeeper 15 Server is the first fragmentation protection for SAN storage connected to physical servers. It prevents fragmentation in real time at the logical disk layer, increasing IO density so more data can be processed.
Drobo’s BeyondRAID technology also gets a boost, so that when you add a new drive it will configure the RAID array 800 per cent faster than before.
Equinix expects that the new program, designed to end channel conflict and properly reward partners, will attract new partners and significantly raise channel revenues.
Qumulo’s software, sold as 1U appliance nodes, integrates real-time data analytics directly into storage, to make data and storage resources much more visible. They sell only through the channel.
The email and network security provider company has over 100 partners in Canada, a tenth of whom joined in the past year.
The mid-sized XT4300 room system will be a stronger channel play than most of the Scopia lineup.
VMware still trails Citrix in the virtual desktop space, and is trying to make up ground by emphasizing some of the new and enhanced features that are unique to Horizon 6.
ADTRAN has dumped product discount rules intended to ensure quality by limiting discounts to partners specializing in the area, while at the same time expanding training with free self-serve modules, and eliminating the deal registration revenue threshold.
Brand new features include Outlook Calendar integration and Quickbooks Online integration, with integration of more accounting software on the roadmap.
Today’s SMBs want to see evidence of innovation from their trusted advisors, but at the same time, solution providers should avoid falling into a false either-or trap – either you get on the cutting edge and change your business model, or you will be out of business soon.
Violin previously sold mainly direct in North America, and had an ineffectual partner program. Now the program has been greatly strengthened, as Violin looks to turn new sales over to partners prepared to commit to and invest in them.
These new scale-out offerings follow up last year’s file sync and sharing solution, as PROMISE moves beyond its traditional product lines with different types of products.
