Tintri's new EMEA channels boss Darren Gross says he took the job because he sees the vendor being able to differentiate itself in a commodity storage market. He will offer the European channel a route to higher margins since he thinks Tintri has little or no competition in the market for manageable storage, particularly from the big name vendors. “It is a well-kept secret that we want partners to take to their customers. We know the demand is there.”
“And it is not necessarily more expensive, even though Tintri's own research shows that price has become less important in this market than manageability issues,” he says.
Mark Young, director of systems engineering, EMEA agrees that partners can get better margins, especially with the ability to add other value added services such as automation and orchestration. “Tintri allows service providers to add specific services for vertical markets.”
Darren Gross will be adding to Tintri's channels in EMEA is a selective way; the partners he needs are those able to take the story to end-users since technical support is available to them with product resource. The market is huge – applicable to all 85 million virtual machines. Gartner estimates that some 78% of workloads are now running on virtual machines.
The performance and add-ons make it likely that any single sale will be quickly replicated for repeat business, he says. It also helps solve the issue of app-driven systems, Mark Young says, “where we have seen some customers struggle with visibility and control.”
The story is around simplicity and guaranteeing performance for applications, which just does not exist on traditional storage architectures. Darren Gross is keen to take on those traditional vendors who cannot offer this.” Not that he is looking for large numbers of partners – the emphasis this year is on getting the right ones educated to be able to sell. Currently the Tintri channel is over 300 globally, with over 20 in the UK The rewards are there in financial terms for those that get the message out to users and engage, he adds, and a new automated reward system is in place to support partners who qualify for incentives.
While the UK and Germany are the main markets for this, having the most virtual machines and demand for advanced storage, the applicability means Tintri can go anywhere, and it is not a particularly advanced technical sale. “It is up to us to educate the channels, however,” he says. And this channel increasing includes service providers, apps specialists and others able to sell the concept of manageability and performance. With this in mind, it rolled out new certifications, demo kit pricing and market development funding earlier this year.