StorOne Debuts New Partner Portal, Preps Updates For S1: Enterprise Storage Platform

StorOne is betting heavily on the cloud with new enhancements to its S1: enterprise storage platform and is backing that up with a new portfolio aimed at helping partners more easily register deals and immediately get end-user and partner pricing.

Software-defined enterprise storage technology developer StorOne introduced a new partner portal aimed at simplifying how its partners handle lead generation and customize marketing materials.

The New York-based storage vendor, which in June updated its software to support Intel Optane storage and low-cost Intel QLC SSDs, also offered an early peek at some of the enhancements it has planned for the next release of it S1: enterprise storage platform.

Extended lead registration, swift user and partner pricing, and partner-customizable information can be accessed via StorOne’s new portal, said George Crump, the company’s chief marketing officer.

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“The portal becomes a hub where partners have access to everything,” he told CRN.

One of the key uses of the new portal is an updated version of StorOne’s TRUprice price configuration center. Earlier versions of TRUprice let partners configure systems for potential end-user clients and get the end-user price, Crump said.

“Now partners can see both the user price and their partner cost for the three-year TCO [total cost of ownership] of the product,” he said. “We send this information to the partner as a .CSV file which can be imported into an Excel spreadsheet to modify as needed. And every lead going through TRUprice is automatically registered to the partner.”

The new portal also has other unique lead registration capabilities, Crump said. Partners can easily see the significant discounts they get when registering a lead, and the lead is automatically linked to a sales rep for easy further contact as needed, he said.

There’s more, said Howie Evans, vice president of Dallas Digital Services, a Colleyville, Texas-based solution provider that has been working with StorOne for about a year and already has one implementation of the vendor’s technology that should quickly turn into a sale.

“The new lead registration site not only returns leads after a lead is registered, but it retains all customer information,” Evans told CRN. “So I can register a deal now, and then six months later I can register another without having to type everything in again. Larger vendors already do this, but it’s nice to see from a startup like StorOne.”

StorOne also holds its deal registrations open for 120 days before needing to update the registration, compared with 30 days for most vendors, Evans said.

Evans also liked the new TRUprice capabilities in part because a partner can get its cost and the end-user price immediately. “And if we need to get down in the weeds on pricing, there’s a way,” he said.

StorOne has also made it easy to do co-branded marketing, Evans said. “We can just go into the portal, upload our logo, attach it to whatever materials we pick, and send to customers,” he said.

On the technology side, StorOne this quarter is preparing updates on several fronts, Crump said.

The company’s vRAID erasure coding technology has been extended to provide rack-level protection against failures without the need for synchronous replication, which Crump said spreads erasure coding across multiple racks.

The company is also adding cascading replication technology that allows data to be replicated from one to up to 16 sites or from up to 16 sites to one, he said.

StorOne is also increasing the write performance of its S1: enterprise storage platform in highly latent situations by 20 percent. On the cloud side, the S1: platform is slated to feature 100 percent seamless connectivity to the cloud by year-end. StorOne is also adding the ability to drag and drop files between on-premises and cloud environments, and make it easy to use the company’s technology for cloud-based disaster recovery and data migration, he said.

Crump said that StorOne is a 100 percent channel-focused company. About 50 percent of the leads are developed by StorOne and passed to partners, while the others are developed by partners themselves, he said.

“We’re still the new kid on the block,” he said. “We see a lot of land-and-expand opportunities for a lot of use cases. Once the partner gets its first sale, it then gets the next one and then the next one.”