All Grown Up In the Golden State

"When a spouse is on the phone, asking when a husband or wife is coming home for dinner, you want to be able to back up your work quickly and reliably," he says.

Matthews knows many of his customers who typically buy his tape, backup and archival solutions are not IT buyers or CTOs, but rather sole proprietors and principals of small companies. The people who buy Certance solutions--or, closer to the truth, are told by VARs that they need to buy Certance solutions--are dentists, lawyers and other professionals.

From that, Matthews has built a rather remarkable empire in storage. And, impressively, he has done so with a straightforward, pragmatic approach to building the company, which was spun out from Seagate one year ago. That's when Certance, which melds the best of "certainty" and "permanence," cut the cord from the mothership. (The latter are Matthews' own words.)

In that time, Costa Mesa, Calif.-based Certance has launched a new reseller program and some new products, and it unveiled a product road map. All doggedly follow Matthews' no-nonsense approach to building a start-up from the remnants of a $225 million division of Seagate.

"We understand our mission, which is not to try to sell $50,000 storage solutions to companies whose entire IT budget might be $2,500, or roughly the price of a PC with a few USB attachments," Matthews says. "Rather, our mission is to become the No. 1 storage and backup supplier to small to midsize companies looking for affordable and reliable solutions."

That's a refreshing sentiment given the number of companies out there that have fallen on their swords trying to aggrandize what they do. (One CEO of a monitor company chided me for calling his product's "tubes." He insisted that I refer to them as "paperless display devices.")

I suspect Matthews' career is going another way. Consider the company's environs, for example. About the only thing swanky in Matthews' universe is the gray, pebbled leather chair and couch in his office. He sits in it about once a month. The rest of the time, he's on his feet trying to plot where to move next.

Last fall, Matthews rounded out his management team with the addition of a new vice president of marketing in Jack Corrao. Then, he turned to expanding his sales overseas with the appointment of Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics to serve as the company's OEM distribution representative in Japan. More recently, Certance has unveiled its first Americas Reseller Partner. By joining the program, Certance resellers will gain access to various tools and information to help increase their sales of Certance-branded products, including its Travan, DDS/DAT and LTO tape technologies and autoloaders and DPA-based CP3100 for disk-to-disk-to-tape solutions.

The program is the work of Corrao and Jo-Ann Downey, director of channel marketing at Certance and former partner-program builder at Quantum and other companies. Downey believes Certance's program is sure to resonate with partners. Her program includes a one-stop portal for all reseller information; free online product training and educational tools; and priority and toll-free presales support and technical support.

One thing that might cause trouble--her idea for VARs to register their end-user customers. Doing so results in improved price discounts, but means handing over key customer data. Not that Certance does much with it, at least for now. Virtually 100 percent of the company's sales go through partners. But as the company explores additional service opportunities and possible software plays, the end-user stuff could conceivably pose some issues.

But not now. Today, Matthews' company is focused on helping partners better grasp the opportunities at hand surrounding building a compliance business--there's information on Sarbanes-Oxley and other initiatives on the company's reseller sites--and selling more storage solutions.

Like others who run companies tied to boring old tape companies, Matthews understands his mission and opportunity. The difference is, he's not trying to make it out to be anything other than what it is. And that straightforward, pragmatic approach may be exactly what your company needs.