Mimosa Systems Inc. is on a mission to expand its Canadian channel and customer base for its e-mail file and archiving solutions with a new Canadian office in Ottawa.
In addition to its new office and its head office in Santa Clara, Calif., Mimosa also has offices around the world, including France, Germany, Japan and India.
The company’s flagship NearPoint software solution product is based on Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) technologies, such as Exchange, and is designed for e-mail and file system archiving, eDiscovery, disaster recovery, backup, recovery and storage management.
Jim Farrell, sales operations manager for Mimosa in Canada, said before opening its Canadian office, Mimosa had been doing business in Canada already through U.S.-based sales representatives.
“As the requirements started to grow (in Canada), we decided we needed a dedicated workforce up here to address the market needs,” Farrell said. “Information management solutions have evolved from being more operational to now being (necessary) because of legal and compliance requirements.”
Right now, Farrell said the company has only a handful of channel partners across Canada.
“We target bigger distribution partners like Dell who resell our products across the globe, and we also target those niche-type players who may have a specific focus,” he said.
In total, the company has 185 partners worldwide, and growing. In Canada, Farrell said he’d like to see one go-to-market partner in each region of the country. At the moment, there are still opportunities for partners in the eastern and central parts of Canada, in provinces such as Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
“We (generally) want partners who are focused on Microsoft technologies and services,” Farrell said.
One partner that fits this bill is Toronto-based CMS Consulting, a professional IT services company and also a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.
Alex Chan, vice-president of sales at CMS, said his company partnered with Mimosa about six months ago because this was a solution area his customers were looking to address.
“Mimosa and their solutions are in line with where we’re heading with Microsoft technology and with e-mail archiving and SharePoint,” Chan said. “CMS has verticals in the municipality and healthcare segments and each have their own direction (of approach) they need to take with their information and archiving.”
While he admits e-mail archiving solutions are not a big part of CMS, he said the company hopes to gain incremental revenue in this space.
“We’re trying to get incremental revenue in this area and we feel NearPoint and our partnership with Mimosa can help us do this,” Chan said.
Depending on the type of partner and their relationship with Mimosa, Farrell said partners can make margins on its software solutions anywhere ranging from 15 per cent, all the way up to 40 per cent.
“My key goal is to take over the market and really build the Mimosa brand in Canada,” Farrell said. “We’re very aggressive as a company because we want to be the defacto solution that customers come to for archiving.”
