Since signing with local distributor, Connector Systems, in September, Nexsan’s global VP of marketing and technical support says he’s happy with the company’s growth in the Australian market, through partners such as Solista, Astrontech, Focus Group, Enable IT, and Merewyn partners.
“After three months I was already impressed with the level of understanding of the product, they’re all in great positions to identify those great opportunities and to really understand how to position the product to customers,” he said.
Nexsan is vendor of disk-based, hybrid disk, and solid-state storage systems. The company was acquired by Imation for $US120 million in January 2013.
Stolz said one of the key differentiators for his company is that it remains 100 per cent Channel focused, and its Leadguard program ensures partners don’t get cut out of any deals they procure themselves.
“Basically, our partners don’t have to feel threatened,” he said.
“We’ve invested heavily in recruiting and training sales staff and staff that really understand the solutions – and we share that quite closely with our partners here.”
The company is in a period of transition, and Stolz said the company made a decision late last year to focus on a few key verticals in the market such as backup and archiving, with security built in.
“We’ve partnered with other vendors, such as Veeam, Commvault and Symantec,” he said.
“Unfortunately, I can’t name them, but we work with some of the largest broadcasters in the states and Europe and across APAC – leveraging our product portfolio as part of their production, and asset management capabilities.”
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Cloud, in particular, has also opened new opportunities for the company.
“We sell into the Cloud quite extensively, depending on the use case. Most think of Cloud as a use case in and of itself, when there are actually use cases below that – there’s a need for high performance, there's a need for long retention capabilities, there's a need for low cost. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive,” he said.
“What Cloud is doing is its causing our end users now to look at physical storage in a more comprehensive way. Because they’re now being asked to compare to Cloud, from a budget standpoint, from an availability or scalability stance, and a time to market compared to Cloud.
“The macro trend either way, is the greater growth of storage.”
Stolz says this is causing a fundamental rethink in terms of IT storage policy, and the Channel needs to reflect that. New use cases such as social media, smartphones and their apps, mean data is growing exponentially, and customers need to prioritise data accordingly.
“The policies that IT used to have five years ago, around data retention and availability, are now being challenged. How can I replicate all the data I have, when I have 10 times the amount of data? Most can’t because they don’t have the bandwidth, they don’t have the budget, so what am I going to do differently?
“We see a huge opportunity to help users manage and help appropriately determine their storage and those different levels of value.”
