With close to 100 channel partners to date, this Canadian-based online data protection solutions vendor is looking to further grow its partner base this year, Steven Rodin, Storagepipe Solutions’ president, said.
This Toronto-based company was founded in 2001 and has a worldwide partner and customer base. Today, the vendor has four major service offerings which include online backup and recovery, e-mail and data archiving, high availability and business continuity and online storage solutions.
Rodin says when the company first started its business, Storagepipe’s primary focus was on online backup and recovery solutions for the mid-size and enterprise markets. But because bandwidth cost has since come down in price, Rodin says small to mid-size businesses (SMBs) are now also taking advantage of online storage solutions.
The company originally focused on direct sales with a selected number of channel partners helping it go to market, however Rodin said about four years ago, the company began to transition towards a channel sales model approach. While Rodin wouldn’t disclose how much of its business goes through indirect channel sales, he did say a large portion of Storagepipe’s business currently comes from Canada.
This year, one of the primary goals for the company is to increase its channel base, which is currently just under 100 active partners, Rodin explained.
Rodin admits that the company isn’t looking for “thousands” of partners, but instead, is looking for “several high quality partners” to add to its channel network, which is made up of silver, gold and platinum-level partner tiers.
“We’d like to grow the partner program to include new high quality partners,” Rodin said. “I think we’ll add 10 to 20 partners this year, but that’s not to say if I find 30 high quality partners, then we’ll go ahead with that. We’re not looking for thousands of partners because we want to keep our partner program manageable to avoid any channel conflict.”
The Storagepipe all-in-one integrated solution includes services around each of the four service offerings and offers users 24×7 off-site data backup coverage, 365 days of the year. The company is also an IBM partner, so the company can also duplicate the infrastructure for use in SMBs all the way up to large business environments, Rodin added.
