Comstor, Presidio Team Up To Offer Cisco-Powered Cloud Managed Services To VARs

Cisco distributor Comstor teamed up with Presidio for an exclusive partnership to support solution providers with managed services alongside its Cisco-powered cloud offerings, the distributor said Tuesday.

The partnership creates a white-label cloud offering backed up by a suite of managed services for Comstor partners, The program ties together Comstor's "Powered By Peak" offering, a white-label Cisco-powered Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering from Peak, with managed services from Presidio, Cisco's 2013 Partner of the Year for U.S./Canada Enterprise.

Comstor, the $4 billion global Cisco-dedicated business practice of the Westcon Group, is backing up the partnership with its own Executive Relevance Selling (ERS) methodology, which teaches techniques such as selling technology to executives and customizing ROI and demand generation.

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Between the Cisco-powered cloud offering, speed to market, managed services support and sales techniques, David McNicholas, U.S. Director of strategic business development and program architect at Comstor, said he doesn't think there is another offering quite like this one on the market.

"We don't see anyone else doing that," McNicholas said.

Comstor is projecting to get between 40 and 70 partners on board with the program within the first year, but McNicholas said he is "optimistic" for more.

Comstor considered all sorts of Cisco partners and regional carriers and Presidio had clearly had the best package of time, investment and talent to spearhead the project, he said. "Flat out the best of breed that we saw. Everything else was a distant second or third," McNicholas said.

Presidio Vice President of Managed Services David McGillivray said the partnership gives solution providers the flexibility to bring leading-edge technologies to their clients.

"It really gives the other resellers that back-end support that once you're up and running and I've transitioned you from your legacy server type environment to more of a virtual one, here's an offering that would support it from a true enterprise level," McGillivray said.

"I think the take-home message really is that they have relationships, they can keep relationships and knowledge about infrastructure and technology, and this will allow them to bring the clients to this virtualization in the cloud and mitigate the clients' risk in the ongoing support with the overall Comstor, Peak and Presidio offering," he said. "It's hard to bring it all together, and that's what Comstor has done. It gives them that whole true competitive offering for the client."

McNicholas said the partnership allows solution providers to fully leverage every piece of their Cisco technology and certification portfolio. Packaging the Cisco technology with the managed services in particular means that solution providers can share in the recurring revenue from those technologies as well.

"The reason this is so valuable to the Cisco partner community is we are coming to the table with an offer that allows them to leverage everything that they’ve invested in their Cisco practice in a profitable, go-to-market-ready hybrid cloud. And we can get it to them in about 120 days," McNicholas said.

"The whole play, if you look at it holistically, puts the Cisco VARs' value front and center," McNicholas said.

PUBLISHED JUNE 10, 2014