Johan Pellicaan is Scale Computing¹s newly appointed MD of EMEA, and he is planning a lot of expansion into Europe. As an experienced channel expert, he has been advising on go-to-market strategies after putting a lot of what he knows into practice with Seagate where he was VP EMEA, and with Microsoft.
Scale Computing will offer disaster recovery as a service. This is currently in its first phase, backing up to data centres in the US, but from the start of next year, it will roll out to Europe, franchising out to MSPs. This is a tried and tested plan: “It will be as I did with eVault –it had six data centre in US and had one in Europe but there was no point in continuing it. We put it out to local MSPs.”
The MSP is all about business economics, he says – ease of use, empowered apps “and this means in EMEA we won't have a data centre, but will go through local service providers”.
He is committed to 100% channel: “I only believe in '100% channel and don't screw them over'. The idea is to have fun together selling. Only in that way can you build loyalty. I've seen too many things happen over the years in a grab for revenue- stupid thing that don't always align with a long term partnership. That means everyone I hire supports the channel.”
In the US, he says, the traditional resellers have often started a completely new MSP business alongside traditional IT with different sales teams. This is because they are selling to CFOs and non-IT people far more than traditionally. The partners know the market and business better, he says. And the managed services area is the one everyone is interested in: “All the smart resellers in Europe are building the managed services business. We believe that because of that the DraaS is the next step in what they can offer as a service. We are here [at IP Expo] to make people aware of us – we have 15-20 partners in the UK, but given our focus on SMB, we would easily have 75-100 partners. There are 50,000-60,000 potential customers, after all.”
The benefits are clear: “The efficiency of our systems against traditional is so much better. The IT employee requirement is 75% less than traditional IT. The salaries of IT staff are still rising each year so this will only continue. Resellers have to change their sales strategy and this will continue to happen. It is the same with software companies on a perpetual model year after year. They are now losing revenue with that.”