Carpathia Hosting Targets VARs To Push Public, Private Cloud Solutions

Headquarters: Ashburn, Va.

Technology Sector: Services

Key Product: InstantOn

Year Founded: 2003

Number of Channel Partners: None

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise Focused Solution Provider

Why You Should Care: Carpathia Hosting has teamed with Citrix on a second-generation cloud initiative.

The Lowdown: Carpathia Hosting doesn’t have any channel partners right now. But that’s about to change. In February, the Ashburn, Va.-based company signed a deal with Citrix Systems to provide enterprise public and private cloud solutions for businesses and government agencies.

Since it was founded in 2003, Carpathia has sold direct. Now it wants to leverage Citrix partners to reach new customers, while also building its own partner base, according to Brian Winter, chief marketing officer at Carpathia.

“There is a very significant channel opportunity for us. [Direct] served us quite well in terms of refining our services, and most importantly in understanding the selling model so that when we fill out our channel program, we can be a good channel partner, as opposed to starting with a channel program and just trying to scale as fast as we can,” Winter said.

Carpathia delivers co-location, managed and cloud services, all with a deep level of compliance across multiple industries, Winter said.

“From a federal standpoint, we have a deep expertise in providing a set of hosting services to agencies to meet their [compliance] guidelines. From a commercial standpoint, we can deliver compliant hosting solutions, and for health care, as it relates to HIPAA, and financial services as it relates to PCI. That’s a big differentiator for us,” Winter said.

Carpathia is using the Citrix partnership as a first step to codify a larger channel initiative and is looking for partners outside the Citrix ecosystem to help build that program, Winter said.

“What we look for are those partners that have customers that are enterprises seeking solutions around production-ready applications that are mission-critical to the business. [VARs] that have relationships with customers from an operations or application ownership standpoint,” he said.

Carpathia traditionally has focused on large customers for its direct business, but it’s counting on Citrix partners, and non-Citrix partners, to build revenue using the company’s new InstantOn offering, which runs on Citrix XenServer technology that can be targeted at smaller businesses like a doctor’s office, Winter said.

“[VARs] have more access to that type of customer so this offering fits very well. It’s an enterprise-grade cloud offering that includes compliance requirements. We think the channel is better positioned to do that than we are,” he said.

Carpathia’s channel margins for partners have not been finalized, but Winter expects them to be similar to VARs’ other services offerings.

“We understand the typical margins that channel partners in the product or hardware space get, low single digits. We recognize that we have an opportunity to deliver higher-margin services. We expect to be able to compensate them,” Winter said.

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