Sonasoft Building Channel To Deliver Data Archiving To SMBs

Company:

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

Technology Sector: Storage

Key Product: SonaSafe data archiving software

Year Founded: 2003

Number of Channel Partners: 20 in the U.S.

Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: Archiving data, especially e-mails, is critical for ensuring availability of that data for compliance and governance, and for emergencies, but it is difficult to do. Sonasoft aims to solve those problems for SMB customers.

The Lowdown: Data archiving technologies have been available for years, but few have traditionally targeted SMBs.

Sonasoft saw the opportunity and developed technology to archive the four types of data most likely to be used by SMBs: Microsoft SQL data, Microsoft Exchange e-mails, files that need to be backed up and recovered and data needed for compliance purposes.

Andy Khanna, president, CEO and co-founder of Sonasoft, said the biggest growth is in the Exchange and archiving areas, which are in many cases very interrelated. "If a solution provider sells one of these solutions, it's easy to sell the other," he said.

Sonasoft's archiving software is available as a stand-alone package that solution providers can install on any industry standard, Windows-based server, turning it into a disk-to-disk backup and archiving appliance, Khanna said.

The vendor's SonaSafe data archiving software is available in four flavors: SonaSafe for SQL Server, SonaSafe for Exchange Server, SonaSafe for File Systems and SonaSafe for Email Archiving.

Avnet, Sonasoft's recently signed distribution partner, is also porting the software onto Hewlett-Packard servers and selling the offering as a preconfigured appliance to its solution provider customers, Khanna said.

The timing for an SMB archiving platform has never been better, Khanna said. "Solutions have been available for years in the enterprise, but disk drives for disk-to-disk solutions have traditionally been expensive," he said. "But now hard drive prices have fallen drastically, so SMBs can afford it."

Sonasoft currently targets customers via a mix of direct and indirect sales. Khanna said that, as a young company, it needed to seed the market with direct sales. "But we're in the process of migrating to a 100 percent channel model," he said.

When a solution provider signs with Sonasoft, the vendor conducts an end-user seminar with the partner in order to help it get started providing a solution and not just another storage product, Khanna said. "We're looking for partners who believe in solution selling,' he said.