Solution Provider Helping Other Solution Providers

Clear Technologies a couple years ago had a great idea: take advantage of its years of experience to build a storage-centric software-as-a-service offering it could take to other solution providers.

As it was building up that service, Clear Technologies, ranked No. 389 on CRN’s 2023 Solution Provider 500, realized that by focusing on storage, it was limiting the appeal of its SaaS offering. So it grew that business to include a wide range of SaaS capabilities covering much of the rest of the data center ecosystem, and is now ready to formally launch it to a wider range of fellow channel partners, making it one of the few solution providers to start acting like a vendor.

Phil Godwin, president of Addison, Texas-based Clear Technologies, told CRN that his company’s new business, which this week is being renamed Visual One Intelligence, now offers reporting, analytics, monitoring, capacity planning for IT infrastructure across storage, compute, and virtual and cloud environments.

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“We found we were getting shut down a lot because people were like, ‘Hey, storage only, is it important to me? We do more than that.’ People heard ‘storage’ in the name, and it became a hindrance to us,” Godwin said. “Not to mention, I get on calls with [analyst firm] Gartner, and it would take me 10 minutes to explain to a Gartner analyst why they should care about what we did since they didn’t care about storage.”

Visual One Intelligence is being offered through other solution providers, including those who may normally compete with Clear Technologies. However, Godwin said, those who partner with Clear Technologies show know that they will not be competing with his company for the Visual One Intelligence offerings.

“We live in a small world,” he said. “This IT world is small. You make one bad decision, and it’s gonna affect you much more than that one decision. So we put things in writing. We put it in contracts. We shake hands. We commit to it. And what I found is, probably 90 percent of people I talked to are OK with that.”