Infinidat makes strategic moves in the channel for company growth
Global data storage company, Infinidat, plans to make waves within the storage space and is making strategic moves to work on this plan, according to the company’s newly appointed A/NZ country manager, James Byrne.
“My knowledge in growing a start-up within the country and the connections I’ve got from my previous work experience will help the company’s expansion in this market. I’m going to work on hiring staff, driving sales, building our channel and marketing strategy,” he said.
The company, which was founded in 2010, has two corporates – one in Israel (the international corporate) and the other in the US (managing the business within the US only). But it also has a presence in global geographies including A/NZ, India, South America, Europe, South Africa, Japan, China, and Singapore.
Infinidat director of worldwide sales, Adi Gelvin, said the company has been in operation in the A/NZ region since June this year and has plans to go head to head with enterprise tier data storage vendors such as IBM and EMC.
The channel is a key focus for Infinidat, and in growing its channel base, the company has inked a distie deal with Arrow. Arrow will distribute Infinidat’s entire product range across the A/NZ region.
“It’s got touchpoints across all the major resellers and service providers. It’s also got a focus on our technology because it doesn’t have 15 other storage platforms. From a focus perspective, it sees us as a game changer compared to other traditional storage vendors and something different to go to market with,” Byrne claimed.
“The channel partners that want to wrap services around our technology – whether that is migration or implementation services – there’s opportunity for them to get integrated into our service models in the early days of Infinidat.”
Byrne mentioned the company will be further building its partner base.
“We’ve partnered with the Gammer Group and Infrx because they’re very influential in the local enterprise marketplace. We have the Cloud Solutions Group in Melbourne and they see Infinidat as their entry into the enterprise customer space. We also have SI Systems in Melbourne as well; they’ve got a focus around the life sciences research sector in universities which is a good play for us.
“We also have a partnership with Stott Hoare in Perth and we’re an option for them to take that enterprise class feature to market. We also have a partner called Saxxon IT that is looking for ways to enter different market sectors using our unified storage platform,” he said.
Byrne also indicated the company will soon be signing on a number of other independent consultants that will help the company grow its market presence. He added that it is looking to ink more partnerships.
“Our channel strategy is partner driven, so we are keen to talk to partners that want to disrupt the status quo in the storage market. We’re looking for partners that understand that space and managed service providers that can offer a utility based model.”
Gelvin added the company has seen growth in banking, telecommunications, and retail sectors but doesn’t limit its expansion into these verticals only.
“Because of the scale, simplicity, and availability of our solutions, you can call it a one size fits all platform because it’s hybrid and if you combine those elements with pricing, it can almost suit any customer that needs high capacity offerings.”
In supporting this growth, the company is in the midst of recruiting a marketing manager, who will be based in Melbourne, and is looking to recruit additional sales and pre-sales personnel and a channel manager.
“Our expansion plans for 2016 will be an evolution of that strategy – for individual sales representation in each of our districts and growing our partner base there. The company’s goal is to go IPO by the end of next year and we want to grow as fast as possible in the next 18 months leading to that,” Gelvin said.
