The changes include increased revenue requirements for all tiers, which break up what had become a top-heavy distribution of partners in a program where advancement was too easy, and permit proper incents of Barracuda’s most valuable partners.
Permabit’s deal with Arrow to bring its data efficiency appliance designed to let the older OEMs compete with the new hyperscale vendors makes IBM the third vendor to bring this technology on board, following EMC and NetApp last fall.
Violin has never been a serious North American channel player before, but having remade the company with a channel-friendly product and channel-centric go-to-market platform, it has selected Arrow as its first North American distributor
The Acronis Backup Service complements last year’s Acronis Backup as a Service. While the latter is aimed at core cloud partners – service providers and MSPs – this new one is targeted at traditional software resellers, and lets them dip their toe in the cloud by having Acronis do most of the work.
Arcserve believes consolidating with a single broadliner will strengthen their market presence as they continue to bring a range of new offerings to market.
StorMagic is looking to re-engage with the channel and build up a strong channel business for its sophisticated solution aimed and priced for SMBs and ROBO environments, which will include more strong Canadian partners.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The improved functionality will help Intronis partners have discussions with customers about providing higher-value recovery strategies rather than simply selling storage.
A new software solution for commodity hardware is aimed at service providers, and won’t be much of a reseller play, but gives SolidFire the distinction of being able to sell the exact same solution as an appliance, infrastructure, as a service, and now software.