Storwize Grabs Data Domain's Channel Chief

Bill Cordero, the new vice president of worldwide channel sales at Los Gatos, Calif.-based Storwize, said he joined the company after a five-year stint at Data Domain where he last served as senior director of worldwide channel sales.

Cordero said he left Data Domain, which was one of the pioneers of deduplication technology, in mid-May, less than two weeks before NetApp announced its attention to acquire Data Domain for $1.5 billion.

NetApp on Wednesday ended what had become a bidding war with arch-rival EMC over Data Domain with a cash and stock offer of $1.9 billion.

NetApp's new bid to acquire Data Domain came just two days after EMC's offer to acquire Data Domain for $30 per share in a deal worth about $1.8 billion.

NetApp's decision to acquire Data Domain came as a surprise to Cordero and all his former Data Domain colleagues. "But there was always a belief that the company would be acquired," he said. "When you invest in a company, you expect it to be sold or go public. Data Domain did both."

For now, though, Cordero's main focus is on helping Storwize develop a channel for its own primary storage and deduplication technology.

Unlike Data Domain, which focuses on deduplication, or "dedupe," to removes duplicate information as data is backed up or archived, Storwize uses real-time data compression to reduce the amount of data stored on primary storage, said Peter Smails, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Storwize.

"We get five to ten times reduction of data in Oracle databases, VMware, or any application in any operating environment," Smails said. "Our technology is completely transparent, with no degradation in performance."

Cordero said his approach to the channel at Storwize is to stay away from the typical startup strategy of signing anyone and everyone as a reseller and instead look for two to three strong partners in each region.

"We want coverage, but we don't want partners to compete heavily with each other," he said. "At Data Domain, we had only 600 partners."

Storwize hopes to have about 200 partners by 2010, and plans to stay with its single-tier distribution model for now. It may look to partnering with distributors eventually as a way to help solution providers provide a source of financing, Cordero said.

The company's channel program includes a deal registration program, although Cordero admits it is too complicated.

"It's a lucrative program," he said. "But it's still a little complicated. We're looking at simplifying it. For a company the size of Storwize, we need to look at simple programs."

While small, Storwize is nonetheless growing. The company is currently hiring channel sales, marketing, and operations people, Cordero said.