Gresham Enterprise Storage launches IT partner program 24 October, 2007 By Vanessa Ho

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Called Channel Vision, the program is a key component towards the company's move to a channel-only sales strategy.

Resellers that are part of Gresham's channel program gain access to the company's tape virtualization director (TVD) solution, Gresham Clareti VTL (virtual tape library), which delivers integrated data protection management and heterogeneous tape library consolidation across physical and virtual environments. The solution combines open-systems VTL functionality with advanced reporting, analytics, and massive scalability of capacity and performance to support the demands of large enterprise backup environments.

"In order to get [our] message out to the industry we needed to become a channel-centric company," said Ed Ahl, vice president of sales with Gresham Enterprise Storage. "I don't want to be bothered going after accounts; it makes us a competitor to the channel and makes them less likely to want to do business with us or be loyal to us."

He added that Gresham is relatively unknown in the industry and in the past only had a couple of people spread around the country that didn't provide the focus and attention the company needed to build their business. "The channel brings us to market much faster and helps shorten the sales cycle and get us in places we would have more difficulty getting into."

The program is broken down into three levels. The Value-Added Solutions Partner offers OEMs, systems integrators, distributors and other high-level IT solution providers the opportunity to partner with Gresham to provide solutions that fuses Gresham's software with a partner's hardware or other product offering. Partners at this level will also receive special discounts on licensing and Gresham's technical staff will work closely with these partners to ensure seamless integration and implementation at the customer deployment site.

The Premier Channel Partner level is designed for resellers that have a national presence and large-volume sales. These partners would receive aggressive discounts based on their participation and the amount of sales of Gresham solutions.

The third level of Gresham's channel program is the Preferred Channel Partner. This level of partnership is designed for resellers that have a regional customer base and expertise working within a specific geography. Special discounts will be awarded to these partners based on their level of participation and sales volume of Gresham solutions.

"There are tiers because you deal with an OEM and a VAR differently than you would a national and regional reseller," said Ahl. "They all have their own needs and requirements."

Features of the program that are common across all three tiers include increased revenue and profit that will provide aggressive incentives and discounts depending on the partner's level of participation. For registered leads, the partners will receive aggressive discounts off the published list price of Gresham Enterprise Storage hardware and software products. To receive a registered lead discount and opportunity protection, the partner agrees to engage with Gresham Enterprise Storage account executives and sales managers in an end user account within three weeks of registration approval of the opportunity by Gresham Enterprise Storage.

There is also sales and marketing support where every partner would receive free sales training, access to a secure partner network site, sales guides and presentations. Partners would also receive lead generation and marketing activities as well as business/territory planning and educational product information.

In addition, Gresham would provide free instructor-led technical and certification training to all partners including one-on-one visits with the partner and their customer, online training webinars, best-practice guides, technical briefs and white papers with the latest technical information on Gresham's products.

Ahl said the ideal partners for Gresham's program are those that are oriented around storage management and have done some consulting.

"We are not looking for someone that is just a box pusher," he said. "They would not be very successful with our product [because] this type of product requires a lot of solution selling within an account and the reseller has to be in there asking the right questions and have to understand the storage business."

Gresham is looking for resellers that are able to wrap the hardware, software and services together and bring it into a customer's environment.

Currently, Gresham has six partners in the program. All are based in the U.S. and Ahl said that his goal would be to add strong resellers in the different regions of the country to get market presence and market attention.

"[We will do] whatever it takes to expand the channel but without diluting margins," he added.