As if they needed more stress, organizations are facing evolving and increasingly stringent compliance regulations from the Payment Card Industry, as well as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and others. Here are a few security compliance products that can make the audit process less excruciating.
Here are 10 of the distributor's hottest new offerings winning over solution providers.
New smartphones from Sony, Motorola and the first-ever Twitter-only mobile device -- the TwitterPeek -- headline a busy week for handset makers as the holiday shopping season heats up.
Company: Zlago
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
Technology Sector: Services
Key Product: Zlago Hosted Windows Desktops and Cloud Services
Year Founded: 2008
Number of Channel Partners: 50 in North America
Ideal Channel Partner: SMB-focused solution providers
Why You Should Care: Zlago offers a hosted desktop for small businesses, complete with e-mail, security and storage, that VARs can private-label to their customers.
The Lowdown: Zlago offers solution providers a way to provide a slew of hosted services without having to invest in a lot of infrastructure itself, according to CEO Michael Gold.
"We look at what are the 80 percent of services and applications that most SMBs use, and try to package them up [and offer them from a single] source. Those include your desktop, e-mail, backup, security, storage, and variety of business applications," Gold said. "Many businesses still want a mixed environment, but our bet is more will wanted hosted [services and applications] over time."
The company is looking for solution providers with strong SMB customer relationships who are ready to start integrating cloud services, said John Rice, vice president of channels at Zlago. In particular, Zlago hopes to attract the attention of distributors' partner communities like VentureTech Network, VARnex and TechSelect, but any solution provider in the managed services space is also a target.
Partners can expect to make margins between 25 percent to 40 percent bringing Zlago solutions to market, Gold said. Zlago launched its channel program in August and offers Webinars and other sales and marketing support to help VARs get on board, he added.
Kevin Gregg, vice president of business development and technical services at Connecting Point Las Vegas, said his company added Zlago because the solution provider can private-label the services to its own customers.
"I like the fact that they're flexible. They also have better expertise from a technical standpoint. When you're dealing with cloud services, it helps if [the vendor] is a little more tech savvy, if you will," he said.
Company: LogLogic
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Technology Sector: Security
Key Product: Open Log Management Platform
Year Founded: 2002
Number of Channel Partners: 3,500 worldwide
Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers
Why You Should Care: LogLogic takes complex log data and turns it into something manageable.
The Lowdown: As its name suggests, Loglogic touts its line of log management tools as a great way to survive grueling compliance audits.
But while compliance mandates, such as PCI, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley drive the lions' share of LogLogic's business, the offering also lends itself to better security and network performance optimization, executives said.
"This is ideal for companies or government agencies with hundreds of thousands of logs to store in one place," said Vince Schiavo, LogLogic senior vice president of global sales.
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| LogLogic Open Log Management Platform |
That information can in turn be used by enterprise customers as a tool in regulatory compliance audits and litigation as well as analyzing network performance issues.
Enterprise companies -- $500 million companies and up -- are the sweet spot, as well as federal government organizations with complex logs, numerous databases and massive amounts of log data that require monitoring, executives said.
Unlike competitors, the Open Log Management Platform can install quickly, and doesn't require many additional vendor-provided professional services.That's where partners come in, executives said.
Instead, partners can take the lead on their own consulting, installation and monitoring services -- such as network security forensics and PCI compliance policy management -- which ultimately will increase their own margins, add value and increase customers ROI, executives said.
"We turned the company over to the channel, running all business through the channel, even deals where we do most of heavy lifting," Schiavo said. "We let our partners drive professional services revenue. Then they're more excited about working with us."
Company: Axxana
Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel
Technology Sector: Storage
Key Product: Axxana Phoenix System
Year Founded: 2005
Number of Channel Partners: 10 worldwide
Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers
Why You Should Care: The Axxana Phoenix System helps organizations achieve zero-data-loss disaster recovery without distance limits in a cost-effective manner when compared with traditional mirroring.
The Lowdown: Storage start-up Axxana Wednesday garnered $9 million in second-round funding, which will help bolster the growth of its disaster recovery technology.
The round was led by Carmel Ventures and included funding from previous investors as well.
Axxana CEO Eli Efrat refers to the company's Phoenix System disaster recovery offering as enterprise data recording, similar to the "black box" technology used for flight data recorders in aviation. Axxan's Phoenix System addresses three challenges to data protection: data loss, distance between data centers and cost, Efrat said.
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| Axxana Phoenix System |
The Phoenix System protects all data, even that which would normally be in the buffer or lost in the "lag," by augmenting the asynchronous replication solution of the enterprise's choice with a local synchronous copy of the most recent write operations protected within the disaster-proof enterprise data recorder.
Right now, the company is targeting financial, insurance, utility, energy, manufacturing and health care verticals. It's not yet in the government arena because of the long sales cycle, according to Efrat.
He added that the offering provides a unique opportunity for solution provider partners, allowing them to help their customers consolidate and eliminate redundant data centers, and to help change how they view, plan, arrange and build those data centers.
Company: 3X Systems
Headquarters: Columbus, OH
Technology Sector: Storage
Key Product: 3X Remote Backup Appliance
Year Founded: 2006
Number of Channel Partners: 160 in the U.S.
Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket-focused solution providers
Why You Should Care: Small business backups are tough, but 3X Systems enables solution providers to build a mini storage cloud with a new backup appliance that keeps up with their mobile and desktop PCs, wherever they are moved.
The Lowdown: 3X Systems wants to help solution providers take the pain out of small business data backup and recovery and get their piece of the small business storage cloud.
The company this week started shipping its Remote Backup Appliance (RBA), a device which serves as a backup target for desktop and mobile PCs even if the PCs are moved to different locations.
Solution providers can bring the 3X RBA storage appliance to a customer site to do the initial "seed" backup, said Alan Arman, CEO and co-founder of 3X. All the office and mobile PC clients automatically backup their data to the RBA as it changes, with deduplication technology cutting the time required, Arman said.
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| 3X Remote Backup Appliance |
The 3X RBA is HIPAA-compliant, and encrypts data in-transit and on the appliance, Arman said. It works with all Microsoft operating systems, and Macintosh and Linux support are on the roadmap. It also supports virtual environments.
The appliance is priced starting at $2,495 with 100 GB of capacity, with no limit on how many devices it can back up, Arman said. It is available only through solution providers, who can earn margins of 18 percent to 38 percent, Arman said.
Olaf Solutions, a Metarie, La.-based VAR, has already implemented several 3X appliances for customers ranging from a two-person air conditioning firm to a $40 million, 60-user company.
Dale Pinney, Olaf's president, said his company also keeps one in its own office in order to backup data for 10 other customers who prefer not to have their own appliance.
"We just passed our first anniversary of working with 3X," Pinney said. "We sent out notes telling customers about signing new support contracts, and no one said no. No one even asked questions about it. It's amazing. It's really telling me that customers are depending on 3X and know it's working for them."
Company: Xobni
Headquarters: San Francisco
Technology Sector: Software
Key Product: Xobni Plug-In For Outlook
Year Founded: 2006
Number of Channel Partners: 20 in the U.S.
Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers
Why You Should Care: Xobni fills the gaps in Microsoft Outlook with more efficient organization of contact information, building profiles that allow users to quickly find the people with whom they're trying to connect.
The Lowdown: If you're a technology startup, Bill Gates publicly describing your product as "the next generation of social networking" has to be the ultimate in ideal scenarios. So it was with Xobni, a San Francisco-based company whose Microsoft Outlook plug-in had Gates gushing with praise at Microsoft's February 2008 Office Developers Conference.
Xobni -- that's "inbox" spelled backward -- makes a plug-in for Outlook that builds profiles of a person's contacts that incorporate phone numbers, e-mail conversations and attachments, and then links this information to social networking Web sites. Xobni displays the profiles neatly in a sidebar within Outlook, and its sophisticated analytics engine enables it to organize large caches of data to let users quickly find what they're looking for.
With more than 3 million users currently, including some 80 percent of Fortune 500 firms, Xobni's time-saving benefits aren't going unnoticed. Individual Xobni users have reported saving 30 minutes to an hour per week, says Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte. "We provide more powerful search for e-mail," he said. "Anyone who's dealing with a lot of relationships and a large volume of e-mail can benefit from using Xobni."
Outlook is one of the most widely used applications for knowledge workers, but it's an older piece of software with its share of limitations, which means there's plenty of demand for the functionality Xobni offers, says Bonforte. Xobni also features integration with Sharepoint groups, policies and files, and is well positioned to add value as Microsoft pushes further into unified communications. "The more users push toward unified communications and collaboration, the more likely they are to benefit from Xobni," Bonforte said.
Xobni's business hinges on licensing its plug-in to enterprises, and its partners make money on the customization side. A Microsoft partner, Xobni has partnerships with around 20 other Microsoft Certified partners that build their own custom Xobni extensions for specific verticals. Xobni partners have built extensions for Salesforce.com, Sharepoint, and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, and many more are on the way, according to Bonforte.
The creativity Xobni has shown in filling Outlook's functionality gap hasn't escaped Microsoft's notice. In April 2008, Microsoft and Xobni were close to an acquisition rumored to be in the neighborhood of $20 million, but Xobni rejected the deal because the company's founders didn't relish their potential role as a tiny speck in the Microsoft galaxy. Xobni has far greater ambitions than being just another feature within Outlook.
"Xobni makes your inbox more social and collaborative," said Bonforte. "Being able to stay there and not bounce back and forth between applications is a key benefit."
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