Hoping to entice partners with margins approaching 40 per cent, Toronto start-up Nevex Virtual Technologies is looking to the channel to market its optimized flash caching software to improve application performance.
Nevex is led by a group of serial entrepreneurs now on their fourth start-up, having focused on areas such as network attached translation and technology and usability in the past. The past start-ups have all been 100 per cent channel-focused, said Nevex product manager Andrew Flint. With Nevex, Flint said they’ve set out to tackle application performance and I/O caching.
“When applications run slowly you have upset users, upset management and, if its your lead business applications, any slowdown can effect the revenue of the business,” said Flint.Some vendors solve the issue by tuning the applications, which Flint said isn’t ideal because it takes a lot of time and it’s only a short-term fix. Others turn to hardware upgrades which, after expensive and painful migration exercises, often don’t deliver the hoped-for performance boost.
“We care about the applications themselves and how to accelerate the applications the company most cares about. The real problem isn’t the speed of the server, but the speed at which it can read the right data,” said Flint. “We’re solving the problem by taking the I/O from the backend server and putting it on the application server itself, by providing caching software that utilizes flash placed on the server itself, so data used by the application is stored locally on high performance media for better performance with less latency.”
It’s a software-only solution designed to accelerate any I/O bound application, but he said it works particularly well with SQL and SQL backend applications. Licensing is per server with a bulk discount available and is lifetime, and a subscription model is being explored. Partners can also offer annual support on top.
Nevex’s route to the market will be through the channel said Nigel Miller, vice-president of business product development, because partners own the trusted relationships with the customers Nevex wants to reach.
“Our product will initially be sold with other products, like solid state drives and flash, or bundled with applications for the data centre. It’s an addition for those VARs, that will be our initial way to market,” said Miller.
Partners can earn 40 per cent margins through Nevex’s channel program, and Miller said since it’s not a “rip and replace” it represents a new revenue opportunity partners can bring to their customers.
Miller said they’ve already signed-up a Microsoft Dynamics partner in Canada, and are in discussions with four to five others.
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