Leo Lynch (StorageCraft)
Storage and data protection vendor StorageCraft has been investing in its Australian and New Zealand business by hiring more marketing, pre-sales, territory account manager and sales and support staff.
The investment follows the vendor's recent launch of a new product suite targeting mid-market and lower end of enterprise.
As a result, the vendor is now looking for people with a different skill-set than before, StorageCraft director of sales A/NZ Leo Lynch told ARN.
"We are going to bring on some new resources and we need different skills to help us take that to market so we are going to be recruiting different types of partners and customers," Lynch said.
To help support this strategy, StorageCraft is also looking into bringing a new set of channel partners in.
"The type of partner we are looking for tends to be the more infrastructure type of partner; very much professional services-based and looking at implementing projects," VP of sales EMEA and APAC Andy Zollo told ARN. "That is where we need to strengthen our portfolio of partners."
These partners include high-end MSPs, systems integrators and also infrastructure partners. Lynch also said that the margins it offers to its partners are "market leading".
The opportunity for partners has expanded since the vendor launched the new suite last August as it now offers a complete solution rather than just a software.
According to Lynch, StorageCraft's disaster recovery-as-a-service solution is one of the key things it offers in the A/NZ market that its competitors don’t have.
"We have a data centre here that partners can just spin up a server in our cloud and in a couple of minutes have their customer's business up and running. Whereas, some of our competitors need to rely on the channel to do that rather than having that as a service," he explained.
He added that the solutions are complementary to what some of its competitors are doing in the market, making it not about just replacing technologies in use but enhancing it for a better customer outcome.
The vendor claims it has 30,000 customers and 2,000 partners in A/NZ, which are also supported by ACA Pacific and Dicker Data in Australia, and Dicker Data and Soft Solutions in New Zealand.
"Our distributors are quite complementary in both countries they are quite different and they don’t have a lot of overlap," Lynch said.
"The key thing we look at is not just the breadth of partners but the composition. Particularly now that we are moving to new end-user customers, we need to make sure we have the right partner base to reach those end user customers."
A/NZ represents a large portion of the company's global business, with Lynch calling it a "disproportionately large part of the worldwide business compared to other companies".
