Jim Ortbals is looking to design a channel system that both encourages collaborative relationships between cloud and traditional partners, and effectively assesses and values the contributions made by each to a joint sale. The complicating factor is that he is aware of no one else who has done this effectively to date.
Zerto 6.5 has new feature enhancements, which will be of particular interest to Cloud Service Providers, but the most significant news here is more likely the continued moves towards their upcoming version, which they see as a massively disruptive offering.
Violin System introduces its first new product since it resurrected from bankruptcy, a NVMe fabric, ultra-low latency offering aimed at the extreme performance market, which is now the focus of Violin’s efforts.
Sungard AS enhances the service it first rolled out last year, with an emphasis on increasing scalability to better meet the needs of larger customers.
Zerto 7, when it becomes available next winter, will add Elastic Journal continuous data protection that adds the capabilities offered by traditional backup to Zerto’s solution.
Zerto is already an established IBM partner, including a relationship with IBM Resiliency. The partnership is now being extended to the IBM Resiliency Orchestration DRaaS offering.
The introduction of their Acuity platform last year has deepened Pivot3 presence in the enterprise, which has in turn led them to strengthen their technology partnerships which address this space.
ZVR 6.0 extends bi-directional replication that Zerto had introduced in their previous release. Another highlight of 6.0 is a new management portal for Cloud Service Providers.
The Azure component is especially significant, as Zerto becomes the first vendor to support replication from the Azure cloud, as well as into it.
Zerto has joined the HPE Complete program, making Zerto Virtual Replication an HPE part number that can be ordered directly from HPE for any HPE platform.
While IT vendor alliance programs typically emphasize API sharing, Zerto’s program involves much more including active building of joint solutions and joint investments in field marketing.
Other new features include Azure support, one-to-many replication capability and a mobile app to enable remote access to Zerto environments.
Zerto has introduced some new compensation features, and is also consolidating its programs, bringing its cloud program into the main program now, with vendor technology partners slated to follow early next year.
Zerto, which sells entirely through partners, is expanding its routes to market with this deal, which it expects will be only the first of multiple such major initiatives.
