Former managing director of Blue Central, George Kazangi, has launched a partner-focused technical services business. Named Four Nines, Kazangi will serve as the managing director of the company.
Following his departure from Blue Central, in which he served for four years, an interim CEO has been appointed as chief strategy officer until a replacement for Kazangi is found.
Kazangi told ARN that Four Nines offers technology services to resellers, MSPs and distributors that have limited technical services capabilities. Services offered include technical pre-sales, consulting, migrations, deployments and on-going support services.
“It is established to provide services at the enterprise level, but also to partner with other technology service providers that don’t have a services capability. Our strategy is to only focus on partners – our customers will only be the technology sector,” he said.
Kazangi mentioned he started the business as in the last 12 months, he has noticed a trend of channel businesses needing more pre-sales capabilities and migrations to hybrid Cloud.
“We need to supply the channel with much needed infrastructure and consulting services to assist partners in growing and transforming their businesses by provider a greater range of services. As a community, we need to make the market better.”
Kazangi said his experience and expertise allows Four Nines to better adapt to the market requirements, offering products and services that are tuned to the specific needs of its partners.
Four Nines is already working with some partners on specific opportunities.
The company is currently in talks with some distributors to offer installation services on behalf of their customers, in addition to offering multi-vendor pre-sales or solutions based pre-sales to their customers. In addition, it delivers multi-vendor solutions as a turnkey on behalf of some of its partners.
According to Kazangi, Four Nines only focuses on the infrastructure stack, which includes server, networking, storage, hyperconverged, VDI and wireless. Technologies covered including datacentre infrastructure, Cloud and automation from vendors such as HPE, Nimble Storage, Veeam, VMware and EMC/Dell.
“We are a partner-led business. We have a rules of engagement process where if a partner decides to come to us direct, we find a suitable partner and hand them over to that partner. That’s where our value proposition is.”
Blue Central is confirmed as one of Four Nine’s customers.
Kazangi said resellers with little or no services capability would benefit the most from this venture.
Read more: Dell cuts take-away repairs
“They are companies that have between five to 20 employees and are generally Tier 2 resellers that have aligned themselves, typically, with one or two vendors that is now starting to see that the solutions they’re providing are multi-vendor and hybrid Cloud,” he said.
Within the first 12 months, the company expects to work with 10 to 20 partners.
The company has hired two server/storage engineers that will start their stints in the next four weeks. It is looking to hire more engineers that have experience in the enterprise arena, can serve as consultants, and are aligned to multiple technology vendors.
