Leveraging channel to expand

Channel Post speaks with Anand Chakravarthi, Area Vice President at Pivot3 on the company’s strengths as a hyper-converged infrastructure vendor and how the company continues to expand in sync with its partners.

Anand Chakravarthi, Area Vice President at Pivot3

Globally, Pivot3 has made its mark as a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) vendor. What is your company doing to increase its visibility, penetration and market share in the Middle East?

Pivot3 is expanding its team both locally and globally as we have added several new headcounts in the region and we intend to add more members in our team during the second half of 2017. We are also developing the Middle East datacenter business in use cases such as Server virtualization, VDI and BCDR leveraging our customer base. In the region we have engaged distributors Ingram Micro and Redington; our pipeline has increased by 400%.

How would you differentiate yourself from other vendors in similar space and what advantage do you provide to the end-users?

We are a company of ‘firsts’, be it software-defined storage or patented erasure coding. With Acuity, our latest hyper-converged software platform release, Pivot3 continues its tradition with the industry’s first and only priority-aware HCI solution having an advanced Quality of Service engine that allows customers to confidently and predictably deploy multiple mission-critical applications on a single infrastructure.

A successful HCI implementation depends on its ability to deliver performance, scale and efficiency. First-generation HCI solutions were deployed for targeted workloads, such as VDI and ROBO environments. While enterprise IT leaders wanted to run additional workloads on their HCI systems, the increased workload density led to increased resource contention, which delivered inconsistent performance results. Acuity addresses the customer’s need to expand their use of HCI and it will also influence the developmental priorities of other vendors going forward. The multitier storage architecture is built around an NVMe PCIe flash data path and integrates our 8th generation erasure coding. Other vendors will be compelled to replicate these capabilities; Quality of Service (QoS) alone is a significant barrier to entry for competitors and new entrants to the market.

What new steps has the company taken to strengthen its channel program in developing its distributor and partner ecosystem?

We are currently focusing on partner recruitment in EMEA, LATAM and Canada. We are recruiting these partners selectively through distributors. We have also invested in localized telemarketing and inside sales resources in each geography to generate our pipeline and assist partners. Lead flow has increased dramatically in all geographies, especially EMEA and LATAM, due to the addition of telemarketing. We will also be rolling out a new Global Partner Program in the second half of 2017.

Which type of channel partners are a perfect fit for Pivot3 and why?

At Pivot3, our partners aren’t your typical partners. They are an extension of our team, where we support them in every way possible to significantly accelerate their sales, out-position the competition, and in turn, help them benefit from attainable partner rewards. Partners that enjoy ease of doing business, collaboration, and strategic, stable and fiscally responsible models that are built for long-term, ongoing relationships are an ideal fit.

What are the challenges that your customers face when moving from traditional hardware-centric model to software defined infrastructure?

The actualization of the software-defined enterprise in 2017 will have its fair share of hurdles. Customers will continue to question whether HCI deployment brings with it a whole new set of requirements, skills, vendor lock-in and potentially the financial risk associated with sunken costs in existing IT resources. Most customers need the ability to grow into a hyper-converged environment over time and the channel should assess whether the solution integrates with existing infrastructure resources and offers linear scalability to grow their environment in a modular, pay as you grow model. Solutions that are optimized to only run standalone workloads actually prevent customers from realizing the full value of their investment in a new technology and present significant barriers to making an efficient transition to a more software-defined enterprise.

What are the key advantages for channel to work with you in comparison to your competition?

As mentioned above, Pivot3 helped define the market as one of the first technology innovators to deliver hyper-converged solutions, but partners may not know that our initial solutions were designed for the highest bandwidth workloads such as rich media and large sequential workloads like video streaming. We built a strong presence in markets that place a high priority on security and video surveillance, which drove market awareness and introduced HCI to early adopters. The security and surveillance industry has evolved into an Internet of Things (IoT) workload, where organizations can leverage the data to derive extremely valuable business insights. The important takeaway here is that Pivot3 has the most experience of any HCI vendor delivering solutions to handle the unique infrastructure requirement of IoT. And partners are discovering that in addition to video streaming, they can run additional workloads on the same infrastructure such as virtual desktop infrastructure, remote and branch office applications, or disaster recovery, which really puts Pivot3 in a league of its own when it comes to HCI. And when you add the release of Acuity into the mix, you take all this expertise, innovation, execution and an award-winning customer support team, and provide partners with a comprehensive set of advantages over the competition, both in hyper-converged, and in traditional three-tier solutions as well.

What is the motive behind the company expanding its technology partnership with major vendors like Lenovo and how does it benefit Pivot3?

Partnership expansion is part of our core strategy and it’s always a great opportunity to initiate a global relationship with a major vendor like Lenovo. By engaging Lenovo’s extensive channel, we have significant opportunity to build on our joint pipeline, and expand field engagement and co-branded programs with Lenovo and its partners. As Acuity continues to be adopted, Pivot3 is becoming one of Lenovo’s fastest-growing HCI offerings, which delivers benefits and availability to more of the channel community, with more options and more choice for customers.

Where do you see yourself after a year in terms of regional footprint, growth and market share?

We continue to leverage distributors in the region to expand the channel and you can expect that to continue. As mentioned, that strategy has resulted increasing our pipeline in the region by over 400% and further recruitment of channel partners is a priority in the second half of 2017 and beyond. I expect our regional footprint to expand, and as we continue with our rollout of Acuity, we’ll continue to grow and solidify our presence in the market.

Last but not least, what message would you like to give to partners who wish to work with Pivot3?

Pivot3 is 100% channel driven, which means our partners are extremely important to us and we build our relationships on an understanding of ‘better together’; whether channel events, customer support or service delivery. Our dedicated Channel Account Managers are the best in the business, ensuring both ongoing enablement and development of partner pipeline.

Additionally, Pivot3 is a game-changer for potential partners since it delivers solutions that are fast, simple, and smart so customers can do more, consolidate more, control more and choose how they build out their environments to be more software-defined.

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