Iron Mountain Digital unveils global partner program 16 December, 2007 By Patricia Pickett

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Through the program, the Southborough, Mass.-based company is offering benefits such as dedicated channel management resources, whereby partners are assigned field-based channel managers and receive help with pre-sales and technical resources for Iron Mountain's solutions. The firm will also supply both technical training and pre-sales technical resources for partners, as well as professional services for managed services providers (MSPs) or hosting partners that provide first-level support, or partners that host Iron Mountain applications. Market development resources are also part of the package: partners will be able to access sales tools and pipeline development resources, as well as other go-to-market assistance.

The partner program will help the channel address two main challenges. One of them is "general end-user apathy," said said Dave Kubick, vice-president of worldwide alliances for Iron Mountain Digital. "Companies have five priorities for 2008; maybe (data protection) is one of them, and maybe it is not." The second challenge is dealing with the proliferation of new data protection players in the market, each offering their own solutions. "I think that's great, but there's a lot of noise in the system," with many confusing messages being sent to the customer, he said.

The program includes four main partner categories. First is the value-added reseller (VAR), which has typically established a scope of influence in a particular geographic market, or within a certain vertical. These partners resell Iron Mountain's solutions to customers ranging from small and medium business (SMB) to enterprises. The next one is the MSP, which typically offers IT services in a remote fashion by integrating the vendor's Connected Backup and LiveVault server backup services into its own portfolio, while hosting the data at Iron Mountain's data centres.

Third is the hosting partner category, which includes mobile and land-line telecommunications and hosting companies that, "by virtue of the contracted or billing relationships they already have with their customers," have decided to extend their services by hosting Iron Mountain's offerings, Kubick said. "(Our services) play very nicely into that model because of the stickiness of a data protection solution," he explained. "It helps these companies limit the customer attrition that occurs in that business." Finally, the technology partner category includes companies that offer complementary solutions to Iron Mountain's offerings, which can be combined into an overall information protection and management solution.

Iron Mountain hasn't set a goal for how many new partners it wants to recruit, preferring to focus on quality rather than quantity. "We want to take the Jack Welch, GE approach to partnering, which means getting the top one, two or three partners in any particular vertical or market on board," Kubick said. "Whether that works out to be 10 or 100, we don't have a preference -- we're just looking for the best. Having thousands of resellers that dilute the value proposition is not good for anyone." In the recruitment process, Kubick said Iron Mountain will consider partners' solutions, the types of vertical markets they play in, their geographical scope, the technological investments they are making and their current go-to-market plan.

Kubick said Iron Mountain has been working with the channel for 10 years and currently has more than 300 partners in 40 countries around the world. The company's offerings "play nicely in a partner's line card," whether the reseller is catering to the small-and-medium-business or enterprise space, he said.

Apart from Iron Mountain's brand recognition, one of the key advantages for partners is the "flexible delivery model of (the firm's) technologies," which are offered as a traditional software licensed product, as well as on a subscription basis, said Kubick. With the subscription model, "partners are able to realize recurring revenues and predictable margins -- they know exactly what their cost model is, so they are in a situation to benefit from the compounding revenues that come from those services."

Another benefit is the fact that Iron Mountain is able to "take the operational elements associated with data protection and put it on our backs," rather than having it all rest on the reseller's shoulders, Kubick said. The vendor supplies all the best practices and institutional knowledge around hosting on mirror data centres underground, and "all the partner needs to worry about is taking the offering to their customers and helping close that business."