With a second round of funding of $4 million and a new CEO at the helm, Victor Walker, of Reldata Inc., plans to leverage and aggressively target the channel community this year.
Although Walker has been the CEO of Reldata, which was named by CDN as a vendor to watch for 2010, for just over three months, his appointment with the company was only announced on Tuesday.
At this time, Andreas Rüter, partner, at Germany-based venture capital firm, Grazia Equity GmbH, and Reldata board chairman, said Steven Murphy, the former CEO of Reldata, would continue to serve on the company’s Board of Directors.
Walker has more than two decades of executive leadership experience in the storage and systems technology sectors and most recently served as the chief operating officer (COO) of ClusterStor, which was later acquired by Xyratex. Before this, Walker was the vice-president of the storage systems product group at Sun Microsystems.
“What attracted me to (Reldata) is they have a strong product set, very good technology and the capability to service legacy storage for customers and virtualize systems to allow customers to offset costs when they migrate to unified storage management solutions,” Walker said.
There’s no doubt that going forward, Walker will have a huge task and responsibility ahead of him when it comes to the channel. It was only a year and a half ago that the Parsippany, N.J.-based company decided to transition its sales model from a direct to a 100 per cent channel-only one.
In a previous interview with CDN early last year, Lanie Kruger, channel and business development director at Reldata, said the company was looking to expand its sales and technical support and partnerships in the Canadian market. At the time, the company had 62 value-added resellers (VARs) and four distributor partners around the world, including two partners who sell into the Canadian market.
Now, Walker said Reldata has increased its partners by 46 per cent for the year and will place an increased focus on the Canadian market moving forward.
“We see Canada as an untapped opportunity for us,” Walker said. “We’re looking for storage VARs and ideally those who are technical and can support a technical sale.”
Walker’s short term goals include leveraging existing channel relations and growing the company’s partner base, in addition to releasing new products in the second quarter of the year.
In the long term, Walker said his goal is to grow the company so it can become a large $100M independent storage company within a three-year time period.
With 80 per cent of its overall business coming from the North American market, Walker said the company will not withdraw its efforts elsewhere in the world, it’ll just be more selective in order to ensure it’s able to offer full service and support capabilities.
“With a fourth quarter investment of $4M from our current investors, we are well-supported to execute on our aggressive growth plan in 2011,” Walker said. “We’ll also use the money for the expansion of sales and marketing opportunities for our partners. This will include hiring sales people to work with our partners to help them promote the products. These will be new positions and will mean more feet on the street.”
Follow Maxine Cheung on Twitter: @MaxineCheungCDN.
