MinIO Launches First Formal Channel Program To Grab AI-focused Object Storage Partners

“We had a program where a partner would send us an email and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got an opportunity here or there,” says MinIO Vice President Mike Marinchak. “It’s about building out a formalized partner portal, deal registration, enablement, and having a profitable model where we can provide 20 points of margin on deals. We really hadn’t standardized any of that.’

High-performance object storage technology developer MinIO Wednesday said it has launched its first formal channel program to better serve channel partners looking to help customers take advantage of AI.

The formal program includes for the first time a standardized program with deal registration and a portal to enable partners, said Mike Marinchak, vice president of global partner sales for the Redwood City, Calif.-based company.

“We had a program where a partner would send us an email and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got an opportunity here or there,’” he said. “Now it’s about building out a formalized partner portal, deal registration, enablement, and having a profitable model where we can provide 20 points of margin on deals. We really hadn’t standardized any of that.”

MinIO is looking for AI partners that can expand its capacity and coverage in a given territory, said Marinchak. “We’re also looking for partners with an AI practice and some level of services and engineering built around data infrastructures,” he said. “We are looking to expand and grow our partners, and that’s where we’re investing in partner resources. We’re making it easy for partners to sign up to help us go after the opportunities.”

The formalized channel program comes as partners are increasingly looking at how to better handle their growing data sets for customers, said Mike Marinchak, vice president of global partner sales for the Redwood City, Calif.-based company.

“We’re starting to see customers look at these large data sets that they have in their data centers now, and they’re really not sure how they’re going to build scale,” Marinchak told CRN. “And I think a lot of that’s been the adoption in the cloud and the success of Amazon (Web Services). Our CEO AB Periasamy wrote the community version of object storage with MinIO, and then we announced AIstor, which is the enterprise version. What’s exciting is we’re now putting our sales and marketing and channel teams together to go after that opportunity.”

About 70 percent of MinIO’s business now goes through indirect channels with what has been an informal channel program, but the company is looking to get that as close to 100 percent as possible, Marinchak said.

“What we’re trying to do first is scale,” he said. “From a scale standpoint, we’ve got this big opportunity of all these customers. We had 149 percent growth over the last two years. Going forward, partners can go to the MinIO partner portal to sign up in one click, get access, and get accredited, Marinchak said.

“We have a one-hour sales accreditation or a six-hour SE (systems engineer) accreditation,” Marinchak said. “We even have a four-day administrator certification, if somebody wants to get very advanced. It’s all very easy. All right, it’s pretty much instantaneous once you sign up and get onto our portal. There’s also pricing available. There are sales tools, all the materials partners need, which we haven’t had in the past.”

MinIO currently has over 20 channel partners in North America, and purposely does not open its program to a large number of partners in order to focus on those that want to lean in on the vendor, Marinchak said. That said, the company is looking to recruit new partners, Marinchak said. To do so, it has expanded its partner organization worldwide he said.

“We have 52 percent of the Fortune 500 [as customers], nine of the top 10 banks, eight of 10 retailers,” said Marinchak. “So there’s a vast array of object storage community users today, and they’re all looking for advanced features: 365x7x24 support, replication, failover. And so we really need partners to help us deliver those solutions to our customers.”

MinIO is driving sales of hardware and services, Marinchak said. “There’s going to be drag with standardized hardware,” he said. “There’s going to be drag with the services that get wrapped around it. And we’re going to need partners to help us deliver that.”

MinIO has become an important object storage technology provider to the channel, said Tom Holt, chief revenue officer at DataEndure, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based solution provider which has been working with the vendor for a little over a year.

“With the adoption of AI and hybrid cloud, we’ve just seen a huge increase in cloud-native, software-defined storage requirements,” Holt told CRN. “We’ve got a ton of SAN and NAS clients through our relationships with Pure Storage and NetApp, but we do see a shift away from those technologies in some of these higher performance workloads.”

Beyond the technology advantage MinIO offers, the company is making the right move with its new investment in the channel, Holt said.

“We chose MinIO based on technology first,” he said. “Now as they’re looking to invest in the partner community, it is refreshing. I would say MinIO is definitely partner-first. It’s a huge opportunity for DataEndure. It’s a huge opportunity for our clients. And this is even without Mike Marinchak going there. We have a long standing relationship with Mike all the way back to his days at NetApp. This is a real opportunity for us, though, and frankly for them.”

MinIO is doing the right things to build its channel program, Holt said.

“It is a profitable business for us,” he said. “And I think, done through the lens of a reseller, where technology and profit and value to our client meet, MinIO is a great solution from that standpoint. And add on the layer of them being partner-first, it’s a great combination.”