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Zadara Strives To Market Storage-As-A-Service Through Partner Network

Zadara, an enterprise storage-as-a-service company, has launched a full-featured program to expand business opportunities for channel partners by enabling them to offer simplified enterprise storage-as-a-service.

“The Zadara Service Program was created with this in mind,” said Roland Serna, vice president of channel sales and alliances, “that channel partners are trying to pivot their businesses to meet the demands of customers wanting to buy infrastructure, and particularly enterprise storage as a service.”

The company’s software-defined platform addresses the shift away from expensive, vendor-locked, big-iron legacy storage as enterprise storage moves increasingly moving to the cloud. IDC forecasts the worldwide cloud IT infrastructure market will reach $88.6 billion by 2022.

The new program, a two-tier partner system, reflects Zadara’s interest in generating more sales through cloud marketplaces such as AWS. The company is also making a significant effort to engage its distributors, said Serna. “We have a weekly cadence with our distribution teams, we have a biweekly cadence with their sales teams, and we have a monthly cadence with the marketing teams,” he explained. Distributor-hosted webinars for their partners are helping Zadara generate excitement about the growing market for storage-as-a-service.

The program offers partners healthy margins, said Serna. “We built the program with some incentives for them to be more competent, so we have a comprehensive competency track as well. And we also built this program with the mind of making sure that they can have a very sticky business as the world turns to an OPEX infrastructure purchasing model.”

Channel partners can choose from three levels of involvement to fit their business needs. Partners have access to marketing resources in self-service portal. Silver and Gold level service partners will be allocated co-op marketing funds for use toward joint-marketing efforts. A comprehensive training curriculum provide access to a variety of programs and tools to help grow business.

The partner program also offers a deal registration tool, RFP proposal assistance for Silver and Gold level service providers to quote storage-as-a-service opportunities, and 24/7 technical professional support.

The company is being careful to align its channel marketing capabilities with partner bandwidth, said Greg Newman, VP of Marketing. “We talk to our partners about the kinds of events we can host together, what kind of campaigns they like to run,” he said. Rather than pushing out big campaigns that only a few larger organizations could support, Zadara is striving to keep the program at “the right speed for our partners,” Newman continued.

Keeping it simple requires Zadara to be involved in lots of little campaigns,” he continued. “We’re planting a lot of seeds, and that works.”

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