Serial Entrepreneur Says Channel Is 'Security Blanket' for Startups

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Serial entrepreneur Jeff Flowers’ low-cost, long-term storage company Storiant is the latest in his long line of startups, and he said maintaining a channel relationship in the startup community is key to growth.

Flowers got the idea for Storiant at his previous startup, Carbonite.

’Storiant is my sixth startup, and number five was Carbonite,’ Flowers told CRNtv. ’And for Carbonite to be successful, we had to develop storage that was low-cost and still very reliable. You couldn’t lose people’s backups or they got very upset, and it had to be scalable.’

Flowers said that he realized if Carbonite needed that kind of storage, many other young companies must as well. With the solution he and the engineers at Carbonite built, the group spun off to start Storiant, which provides similar massive-scale capable storage software to Google, Amazon and Facebook, but in the form of a secure private cloud. That privacy is crucial to Storiant end users, which include financial institutions and pharmaceutical organizations.

Storiant’s low-cost, scalable software also provides the foundation to leverage big data analytics, a burgeoning space in IT. The startup is backed by Matrix Partners, a venture capital firm that has also invested in Apple and Aruba Networks.

Storiant, which continues to recruit partners, views the channel as a trustworthy advocate for its solutions.

’A lot of the guys will have a security blanket with their partners; they’ll be used to buying one of those partners and it just gives them the confidence that if it’s endorsed by our partners, supplied by my partners, I won’t be left in the lurch for providing this,’ Flowers said.

’The partners have been a very important part of almost all of my six startups,’ Flowers said.

PUBLISHED MARCH 19, 2015