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Vyatta hasn't had difficulty attracting partners in the past, Herrell said, because the open-source community is built on viral buzz and it doesn't take long for hot open-source products and platforms to get noticed. The change Vyatta has seen in the past year, however, is that new partner recruits are as much traditional networking shops with legacy Cisco and other practices as they are open-source aficionados.
Global systems integrators are a key expansion area, Herrell said. He wouldn't name any of Vyatta's newer system integrator partners, saying they were under nondisclosure agreement with several deals still pending, but many are those who "realize their practices need to include networking as part of the virtualization story."
"They may be a Cisco specialist up until they realize that Cisco doesn't have a virtualized operating system they sell," he said.
Both Herrell and McCafferty acknowledged that Vyatta channel partners and customers tend to learn best from each other. Vyatta actively encourages the use of Vyatta.org, a companion Website to the main company site that houses the Vyatta community forums, various downloads and documentation resources and social networking outreach.
Still, they said, the growing channel program requires fine-tuning. The company recently began to offer deal registration for its existing partners. Later this month it will launch a new channel program with a classification for service providers, cloud platform provides and MSPs -- "generally people that would deploying in a customer-facing scenario in high volume," McCafferty said.
As Vyatta continues to grow it will do so without Dave Roberts, its former vice president for strategy and marketing, who officially left the company last week.
Roberts could not be reached for comment following his departure, but Network World late last week reported Roberts is the new vice president of strategy and marketing for cloud platform provider and XaaS ("everything as a service") specialist ServiceMesh.
In an e-mail to Network World posted on the news site, Roberts said it was "time to move on" and that he's "pleased to see the company continue to gain customers and show the world that it doesn't need to buy overpriced, underperforming kit [sic] from Cisco."
Herrell told Channelweb.com that any channel concern over Roberts' exit is a "tempest in a teapot."
"Four years is a lifetime for some people in a startup," Herrell said. "He did a great job of helping us understand how to get into this market. He remains a friend of the company and he's in a new endeavor."
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