Co-selling approach working for Infinidat

Storage player Infinidat saw its business improve by 59% in its first quarter, and the firm has its channel to thank for a lot of that growth.

Efforts to grow the business with partners have been paying off, but the focus is on encouraging more to sell a greater share of the portfolio and to work with the vendor to unearth opportunities with co-selling initiatives.

Eric Herzog, CMO at Infinidat, has a CV rich in channel experience picked up at the likes of EMC and IBM, and he is keen to share the lessons he has learnt and keep momentum going with its partners.

“The corporate strategy is to be heavily channel focused,” he said. “We leverage our partner base, we work with them, we joint sell and we bring opportunities to them. They bring opportunities to us.”

The firm launched its Infuziast Certified Partner Programme in North America at the start of Q1 and is now rolling it out to other European countries, including the UK.

“It’s all about certification, and there’s two types: there’s a technical track – so things like solutions engineers, system engineer, solutions architect – and then a sales track. So, whether that be an outside salesperson, or if some of the bigger partners even have inside salespeople...that’s available through our teams,” said Herzog.

“Co-selling with the partners all over the world has been a very successful model for us in the UK and across all of Europe,” he added.

Those programme launches and increased support for partners have been accompanied by an expansion of the channel base.

“We added 15 distributors to the mix, and we added 30 new partners in Europe and then we added around 10 in the US,” said Herzog.

The firm is continuing to work on systems and processes that develop more support for partners and help identify opportunities in existing customers as well as fresh business.

“With our system and our sales development reps, we have worked with partners to create a joint list of prospects, so these could be an existing customer of theirs who is not buying Infinidat, maybe not even any storage,” said Herzog.

“The days of the storage-only partner are long gone...partners sell a lot of stuff," he added.

The firm has been developing processes in North America, but has already started to roll those out in the UK and Europe and will continue to ramp that up over the next few months.

Herzog said that it was also encouraging partners to look at some of the growth areas across the industry.

“The hottest thing right now in the storage industry is cyber storage resilience, cyber storage security. We do very well in that space,” he added. “Partners offer extensive [value], not just technical value, but...business value.”