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Why Cloudian favours partner quality over quantity in A/NZ

Director James Wright reflects on the vendor's progress in the channel over the last 18 months.
James Wright (Cloudian)

James Wright (Cloudian)

Over a year ago, Cloudian set itself a goal of doubling its partner base in Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) over 12 months. While it didn’t quite hit that target, this has not stopped the storage vendor's efforts to expand and build deep relationships with the region's channel players. 

Speaking to ARN and Reseller News, Cloudian ASEAN, Oceania and A/NZ director James Wright said the vendor had signed up more than 30 partners across A/NZ in 18 months. 

“I'm very structured in my approach," he said. "I have a very solid go-to-market strategy and route-to-market strategy and we've just been executing against that strategy."

“For the last 18 months, we've continued on our way of engaging the channel to solve unstructured data problems. We've done that now with a great reseller base, we have a great service provider base and we have a lot of great end-users that are now reaping the rewards of our solution.

“During that time, we've also grown our team in Australia and off the back of quite a great year last year, we've now got the approval to continue the growth within the A/NZ and ASEAN region.”

The priority around doubling its partner base 18 months ago was eventually shelved, with the quality of discussions trumping the quantity of partners. This, for Wright, meant a more targeted approach. 

“Service providers have continued to be a very specific group for our strategy,” Wright said. “Having said that, I think we've got a better balance in A/NZ between service providers and end-user business.

“In New Zealand, we've done exceptionally well with service providers because of the lack of cloud presence of Azure and AWS. As a result, we really got a great foothold there early on. Now we're spreading that across Asia and A/NZ.”

Cloudian’s current partner plan, according to Wright, sees the vendor start with one distributor partner, followed by five to six partners split between enterprise, corporate and government sectors.

“We try to allow that partner and the distributor to flourish in their own market space and we find that's quite a successful strategy,” he explained.

“The goal is twofold; we look for end-users and best use cases for our solution and then we also look for service providers.

“So, we're looking to provide not only a capex, sale or use for our solution, but also a service through a service provider — back to the fundamentals about the reseller channel and the end-user business that drives but also the service providers and offering our platform as a cloud storage service.”

In Cloudian’s oncoming new financial year, Wright claims the next 12 months will be “really exciting” with the continued execution of its ongoing strategy.

“That strategy and the continuing development of our partner network is going to really accelerate. I'm really looking forward to this next 12 months of growth and seeing where it can take our partners, ourselves and the development of the market as well,” he said.