While many distributor programs tend to be limited term and focused on moving specific products for vendors, this program, a first of its type for D&H, is long-term and focused on providing assistance to help resellers build up their Cisco practice.
Unitrends only added a channel component to their business in 2013, and now are dispensing with direct entirely to give partners the confidence their vendor won’t poach deals from them, which will in turn encourage them to invest more in Unitrends.
A new Proactive Print Advisor service is another strong channel play in a series of new and enhanced print solutions and services HP has announced.
Asigra has a different set of marketing concerns than a decade ago, when customers didn’t know their name at all, but they are continuing to ramp up their efforts.
Toronto solution provider Storage Guardian has opened a new data centre, which also contains space and facilities to provide temporary office space to customers whose offices are closed by a disaster.
At its partner event, Asigra discussed its continuing strategy for keeping itself and its partners competitive in a world of sinking backup margins, including new ways to cut partners’ hardware costs and create new revenue opportunities for them.
Adding Convirture’s day to day operations management capability to Accelerite’s disaster recovery focus provides a single pane of glass with a consolidated view of the management of the multiple clouds and internal virtualization technologies in modern hybrid data centres.
In a grim future of zero backup pricing, Asigra’s CEO told partners their future profitability – and survival – depends on their ability to build trust with the customer, and on their ability to sell additional services around it. An archiving capability, centred on Asigra’s new appliance, is a key part of this.
These include a ‘born in the cloud’ router, a sync and share partnership with ownCloud, a new Backupify for Office 365 solution, a new Linux agent and an enhanced partner portal.
Unity EdgeConnect, which builds on the Unity fabric Silver Peak announced last year, is a virtual network overlay which leverages broadband to connect users to applications, while also letting them retain their existing routers and firewalls and move to a broadband WAN at their own speed.
The free Connector front-ends a NAS device, allowing the Transporter appliance to sync important files and folders seamlessly to users’ laptops and mobile devices, to overcome NAS’s limitations with mobility.
Partners who have been selling A/V gear should like the Surface Hub, which Microsoft is touting as a product that will make traditional high end conferencing systems and displays obsolete, as well as replace projectors, wireless receivers and digital whiteboards.
The Québec-based solution provider continues its strategic acquisitions by buying Markham ON-based Multipost, which makes POS software for smaller retailers. ACCEO also indicated that more acquisitions are coming in the next few weeks.
The company formerly known as GFI MAX is introducing a new DRaaS pricing option that charges by the device instead of data usage, something they believe will especially appeal to partners serving larger customers.
The new functionality will also let service providers provide their customers with cloud-based disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) through the new Veeam Cloud Connect Replication for Service Providers offering.
Scheduled to roll out in Q3, the updates to the portfolio address specific use cases. They are: support for KVM, including Nutanix’s new KVM-based hypervisor; a storage-heavy Lite-Compute node; a new appliance that provides Nvidia GPU support; and a short-depth, 1U form factor appliance.
Acropolis combines Nutanix’s flagship Distributed Storage Fabric with their own hypervisor and a new app mobility fabric which will decouple apps from their hypervisor, let users use the Nutanix hypervisor, and massively cut their virtualization costs. Prism complements it with simple management. Acropolis and Prism make up the new Xtreme Computing Platform.
This solution, using the McAfee Network Security Platform, starts with market leader VMware, but will eventually cover the others in the space. And while this Intrusion Prevention solution is the first to be rolled out, the plan is to extend the platform to cover Intel Security’s other virtual infrastructure products.
Sennheiser, best known for its premium consumer products, already has a strong distribution network in Canada, but adds two more distributors to generate more opportunities and stimulate even greater awareness of its presence in the commercial space.
Dell indicated good progress on their green fields discount initiative, overall commercial business, and partner education efforts. While the number of partners using Dell financing jumped considerably in Q1, the company wants more participation there. Plus, still no firm date on when Dell will team up with SYNNEX in Canada.
