Data storage management vendor storONE intends to ramp up its European channel after initially breaking out of its main North American market at the back-end of 2021.
At that time, it hired a global channels chief and appointed Spinnakar in the UK as its first European distributor. Climb Channel Solutions, a storONE US distributor, then went on to acquire UK distributor Sigma, to add to the European footprint. Climb then acquired Spinnakar last year.
But it has been a pretty false start since then though, as storONE CEO Gal Naor (pictured) admits the company only has “tens of customers” in the European region.
Last year, the software supplier launched its Virtual Storage Containers concept to make it even easier for end customers to manage their data in any environment using less hardware; changed its licensing formula to a simple per drive of any size price point, instead of the amount of data being managed; and hired a global chief revenue officer to help kick-start sales growth.
The channel is where the company is focusing on now, however. At this week’s IT Press Tour of Israel (which IT Europa is attending), where New York-headquartered storONE has its roots, Naor said the firm was now hiring channel staff across all the major markets, including the UK, France, Germany and Belgium, for instance.
He said the company globally currently had a total of “over 60” staff, and the plan was to hire around 30 channel-related staff in Europe.
“We are welcoming new partners to contact us, this is a perfect MSP play, as they can use our software to sell even more services around it,” Naor told IT Europa. The product itself though already includes the likes of automatic data management tiering, and ransomware protection, for instance.
A typical storONE customer deployment is said to be worth “a few hundred thousand dollars”, illustrating the high data capacity environments it is targeted at.
