Datto Inc., a U.S.-based vendor of hardware-based onsite and off-site backup and disaster recovery solutions, is looking to increase its Canadian partnerships this year as part of its channel-only go to market sales strategy.
The company is based in Wilton, Conn. and was founded in 2007. While it initially went to market using a direct-only sales strategy, in the past couple of years, the company transitioned to a channel-only model.
Shannon Kohn, channel relations director at Datto, who just joined the company two months ago, said the company has since been making “tremendous strides” when it comes to cultivating its partner relationships.
While the company has a little over 900 channel partners in the U.S. and Canada right now, it’s looking to build more partner relationships, particularly in Canada this year, Kohn said.
“Right now, we’re heavily focused on the North-East (U.S.) since that’s where we’re based,” Kohn said. “We’ve saturated that market a bit and are now trying to expand further across the U.S. and elsewhere. Canada’s a huge focus for us in 2011.”
While she doesn’t have any firm partner goals set for Canada this year, Kohn said ideally, she’d be happy with forming relationships with a “couple hundred” partners here.
The Datto solution portfolio includes its G Series, Z Series, Viridian, Aurora and its most recently released Siris solutions, all which offer onsite and offsite backup and disaster recovery protection.
Datto’s Siris offering, which was just announced earlier this month, provides businesses with end to end business continuity. There are five key benefits to this solution: inverse chain technology, which ensures when a full backup is performed, the newest backup comes first in the backup chain, the convenience of being able to fully manage the solution over the Web, local instant virtualization which allows backups to be virtualized outside of the Siris device, instant virtualization offsite, which enables users to launch virtual machines inside Datto’s secure cloud and screenshot verification of backups which are sent to users in the form of an e-mail report.
The Siris solution is ideal for managed services providers (MSPs) to provide to their SMB customers, Kohn said. Customers can get up and running with Siris in as little as five minutes, she added.
“Our solutions are very flexible, so we can work with many verticals,” Kohn said. “Generally, we’re looking to partner with an MSP that does between $1 to 5M a year.”
While Datto does not currently have a channel program, Kohn said Datto partners do have access to a partner portal. Here, partners can access resources such as marketing materials, specifications, pricing sheets and ticket support.
On why the channel community should partner with Datto, Kohn said, “We’re incredibly straight forward with our pricing and we offer free U.S.-based technical support to all of our partners. We try to make things simple and easy to understand and there are no hidden fees, or costs for off site virtualization, disaster recovery or the initial backup implementation.”
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