Bright Computing Buckles Down On Channel Growth

Bright Computing, flush with an infusion of capital, wants to make waves in the cluster management software space.

To do that, the San Jose, Calif.-based company has gotten serious about its investment in the channel as it further refines its software, which helps customers -- mostly in the enterprise -- manage server clusters used for high-performance computing, Hadoop and private clouds.

Bright recently closed on $14.5 million in Series B funding, in a round led by DFJ and its sister European fund DFJ Esprit, in addition to Prime Ventures and ING Corporate Investments.

[Related: Follow The Money: 10 VC Investments To Watch In August]

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

The capital will be funneled into improving the Bright software, in addition to building up the support team and channel, the latter of which will be key to the company's growth plans.

"Until recently, we weren't able to help the channel as much as we would like because we didn't have the resources," Bright Founder and CEO Matthijs van Leeuwen told CRN.

The company hired a dedicated channel manager for the U.S. in Rick Young, who's charged with helping the company grow its base of 75 partners worldwide. The majority of those channel partners are in North America.

Roughly 60 percent of the company's total revenue is generated through channel partners. Sales from the channel is actually a lot higher, van Leeuwen said, if the business is being viewed from the standpoint of deals. That's because a large chunk of the company's revenue is generated from a few big accounts, which Bright handles directly.

Elk Grove Village, Ill.-based Ace Computers has been working with Bright for about three years and has started to do more with the company in the past 12 to 18 months, Ace Vice President Mar Fertik told CRN.

Ace initially worked with Bright on a couple of projects and its technical team liked the experience, Fertik said. It also helped that Bright requires a smaller minimum on clusters than some competitors, he added.

"I think their software's good. Their people are good. We're certainly moving more to work with them and not less with them," Fertik said.

NEXT: Bright's Growth Playbook

Young's appointment to oversee the channel also is being reinforced with investment in the company's support team.

"A lot of opportunities that our direct sales force works on ends up going through the channel," van Leeuwen said. "We want to grow our channel [and] we want to encourage our channel to be successful with our product, and so it really helps them if we bring them leads and opportunities."

The channel continues to be important to Bright for a few other reasons, largely of which rest in how van Leeuwen sees Bright as a piece in a larger solution package offering.

"Many, many customers want a total solution. They don't want to just buy software," van Leeuwen said. "Hardware, for example, we don't do hardware and most of our partners do hardware. So partners provide a complete solution of which we are just a part. And then there's also a customer preference. Customers like to work with, or purchase from, local channel partners that they know and that they've done business with before."

Enhanced channel marketing could be seen as early as this year, but van Leeuwen said the strategy is still in its early days.

The company currently features its partners in newsletters, or goes in jointly on case studies or trade shows with partners.

Bright also plans to work with some of its closest channel partners this year on a refreshed program that could be rolled out as soon as the start of next year, van Leeuwen said.

Bright's also looking to grow its San Jose office, which currently has about five workers, and the company's "very ambitious," van Leeuwen said. He tempered that thought with improvements in the software he still sees room for.

"The product is a very mature product," he said. "It's being used by hundreds of customers around the world, but we're still full of [ideas] to make it even better and support more applications and more ways of using it."

PUBLISHED SEPT. 5, 2014