Company: StorageCraft Technology
Headquarters: Draper, UT
Technology Sector: Storage
Key Product: StorageCraft ShadowProtect
Year Founded: 2004
Number of Channel Partners: 4,750 worldwide
Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket-focused solution provider
Why You Should Care: StorageCraft provides a product that is already endorsed by major vendors and a channel-centric sales program that looks to benefit partners with high margins.
The Lowdown:Solution providers working in the disaster recovery and business continuity field are probably familiar with StorageCraft Technology's ShadowProtect software, even if they don't realize it. For years, StorageCraft licensed its software to major backup players like Symantec, EMC and VMware, all of which use its snapshot driver technology.
With such major players using its technology it shouldn't come as surprise that the people running the company thought they could do well for themselves by forming their own channel program and working with solution providers directly.
"Our snapshot drive gave us the ability get the technology out onto millions of systems worldwide," said Brandon Nordquist, vice president of product management for Draper, UT-based StorageCraft. "Through [OEM] partners we got onto a lot of different types of machines, and the technology is rock solid."
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| StorageCraft ShadowProtect |
"ShadowProtect does one full backup. After that, our technology does incremental tracking on a sector level," said Nordquist. "We're at the sector level and not file-based. That means we do bit-for-bit back up of the system."
Sector-level backup means that during a backup, everything is grabbed, including the OS, and critical data updates and tweaks that an in-house employee has made to the network.
"We back up to an exact point in time," said Curt James, vice president of marketing and business development. "After the initial backup we do incrementals -- backups that are extremely small."
StorageCraft believes in an indirect sales strategy and has developed two different models for solution providers depending on how they handle their business.
First, the No Cost Reseller program is open to partners that fill out a form. Once that form is received and accepted, StorageCraft will send solution providers a channel partner kit, complete with software. Additionally, the company assigns a technical and business support person to each solution provider, provides free training, shares leads and engages in co-marketing activities.
Solution providers can take advantage of the No Cost Reseller program by working in volume. StorageCraft provides a 20 percent discount for solution providers on the software which drops with volume.
The other route available to solution providers is the Managed Service Provider Partner Program. Joining this track gets a solution provider hard copies of ShadowProtect, a business development manager and technical support. The advantage for MSP partners is that they can charge whatever they want for services that are built on ShadowProtect, allowing them to earn money with low licensing costs for the software.
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