QuorumLabs Offers High-Margin One-Click Data Recovery

Company:

Headquarters: Fremont, Calif

Technology Sectors: Virtualization

Key Product: onQ

Year Founded: 2008

Number of Channel Partners: 40 in the U.S.

Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket-Focused Solution Providers

Why You Should Care: QuorumLabs promises margins in the 50 percent range for reselling one-click data recovery that has businesses back up and running in just minutes.

The Lowdown: QuorumLabs isn't looking for just any old partner. The two-year-old storage vendor is a 100 percent channel player that is moving cautiously to build up a North American partner base of midmarket veterans and managed service providers, according to CEO Robert Habibi.

"Right now, we're focused on a segment of the channel that's the trusted IT advisers. So both VARs and MSPs, but the infrastructure players are the ones more apt to take advantage of us," he said.

QuorumLabs' onQ is a hybrid, virtualized data backup appliance that delivers a complete failover schema in one shot for smaller organizations that for cost reasons can't put together the integrated, multivendor backup solutions that enterprises deploy, Habibi said.

The upshot is that onQ gets smaller companies right back in business in mere minutes following a catastrophe, with one-click recovery that rivals that of much larger organizations -- a prospect that has potential partners pretty excited, he said.

"In my life, I have never seen a product or technology that gets the channel as excited as this one has," said Habibi, who has worked for such IT giants as Sun Microsystems and Unisys in his decades-long tech career. "We came back from an event with MSPs last fall and we literally had to hold them off with a stick."

Part of the reason must be the 50 percent margins for partners that QuorumLabs promises for reselling its $20,000 onQ appliances to SMBs and midmarket customers.

"Online backup is becoming heavily commoditized. I deliver all that complexity in a pair of appliances," Habibi said. He said QuorumLabs is getting calls from larger solution providers who want to use onQ to build out "super-large, multitenant back ends," but the company is "pushing off" such engagements for at least a couple quarters.

For now, Habibi said he is content to build up relationships with smaller partners, many of whom are already engaged with heavily regulated industries, who are ready to work with QuorumLabs to ensure that its offerings aren't simply commodities.

"We don't want them to sell storage, we want them to sell business availability," he said.