Druva is mainly focused on the enterprise space, and its new MSP channel will give them a stronger presence downmarket. They are especially looking to recruit new MSPs who have no data centre.
Lenovo sees strong momentum in its server business, with its core server business showing signs of beginning to scale growth, and its roster of hyperconverged partners offering significant potential in that space.
Deepening enterprise penetration, increasing cloud business, and improving attach rate on partner VMware and Microsoft sales are at the top of Veeam’s agenda for this year.
DataGravity, which is available to the Canadian channel through Ingram Micro, is run by the team who created Equallogic, and offers data security, search and data protection in a single storage platform.
Phoenix, which is based in Newmarket, but which has offices across Canada and in the U.S., adds a key partner to iDashboards, which makes visually appealing business intelligence dashboard software.
With a view to both expanding the number of skilled ByDesign people available to partners, and sharpening partners’ ability to use and extend the solution, SAP has launched several ByDesign initiatives, including a partner enablement portal and collaborative tool, and a certification program through Open SAP.
The company has put measures in place to drive North American server sales through the channel, and while it is still a distant fourth in server revenues, they are eager to make up ground this year.
The new cloud offering comes from a Canadian-based datacentre, and is designed to appeal to SMBs as well as midmarket customers considering cloud.
Two new systems were announced, the FlashSystem 900, a pure speed system aimed at traditional flash use cases, and the V9000, which IBM believes can replace high end spinning disk arrays.
While converged backup is becoming more common, Infrascale’s offering, which includes WAN optimization and a cloud gateway, is unique.
Networking vendor TP-Link looks to expand beyond SOHO with the new JetStream 28 port switch, its first L3 managed switch.
The BE6000S supports four virtual machines, is targeted at 25-150 user organizations, and costs 22 per cent less than the BE6000, which has the same software, at the lowest configuration.
Last year rumours surfaced that SAP was shutting Business ByDesign down, but instead it has moved it to the HANA platform, given it its own general manager, and changed its go-to-market model to better leverage partners.
The 9800 is the first entry in the SuperMassive 9000 series to be branded solely as Dell, without SonicWALL on the bezel, reflecting the company’s increased focus on the Dell brand.
The Margin Rewards program gives an additional discount when the partner does business with new logos, to reward them for bringing in new business. It goes into a discount pool that the partners can use to buy software, which they can pass on to a new end user, or use themselves.
Cisco’s new UCS Mini server is designed for the remote office market, but the new entry-level offering opens up the SMB-heavy Canadian market to UCS.
VMware sees growth in cloud and end user computing, and tells partners it has to shift its sales motion as it becomes much more than a one-product company.
Storage contender Nutanix is finding its niche in Canada, growing to 16 people in 16 months and bucking the trend of managing Canada from the U.S.
Dell has introduced four new appliances, in partnership with Nutanix, Cloudera, Oracle and Fusion-IO.
Avaya announces the requirements for its new speicalization-based partner program slated to debut later this year.
