With an existing base of Canadian customers, Continuity Software, a disaster recovery management software vendor from Israel, wants to expand its channel presence to the country now.
The company was founded five years ago in Tel Aviv by Gil Hecht, Continuity Software’s CEO. With a 100 per cent indirect channel-focused sales strategy, Continuity Software goes to market with its channels in one of two ways, through traditional distribution and reseller partnerships and through original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
Continuity Software currently has partnerships with a handful of OEM partners, which enables the company to do business around the world. But still, it lacks a channel presence lacks in Canada. The company is in talks with “several potential channel partners in Canada now and the country can expect to see a channel (presence) here within the next quarter of this year,” said Hecht.
With its research and development centre located in Tel Aviv and its U.S. headquarters in New York City, Hecht said once its channel is established in Canada the partner community will be supported through one or both of its two offices.
From a distribution perspective, Hecht said Continuity is looking for a distributor that knows how to distribute software products in Canada. “They need to know how to find and sign the right systems integrators (SIs) and channel partners who will be effective in selling to medium and large enterprises,” he said.
As for SIs, Hecht said the company wants partners that know how to sell enterprise software and know how to sell data centre, storage and systems management and network management software.
The RecoverGuard management software solution is the company’s flagship product that addresses the data centre, disaster recovery, high availability and private computing, Hecht said. The company is also working to release software that will work with public cloud environments, but that won’t be until a later date.
“RecoverGuard is an agentless solution that finds problems with high availability and disaster recovery immediately as they happen,” he said. “It sits in one place on the network and scans the entire IT environment. And everything goes into a gap risk data base which is community driven.”
Its latest version, RecoverGuard 5.2 now features high availability, disaster recovery and risk detection for private cloud environments. With this release, the software can also support HP XP, an enterprise storage platform, in addition to support for other storage platforms including EMC, HDS and NetApp. The software is sold by a subscription model which helps partners with their overall revenues, he added.
As for margins, while Hecht could not say exactly how much partners can earn, he did say they’re “competitive in the industry” and that “partners can make more money selling our product than they could compared to selling most other products.”
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