Four resellers land drop-off gig for data recovery vendor

A data management firm has commissioned four channel partners to enable customers to locally drop off IT equipment, which resellers said will give them more chances to connect with clients. 

Until now clients had to ship their equipment to Kroll Ontrack's data recovery "clean room" in Brisbane. The new agreement ensures local drop-off points will be available through partners in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.

"Customers come to a service partner because they trust them," Adrian Briscoe, Kroll Ontrack general manager APAC told CRN. 

"[The drop off locations] give an opportunity for our partners to talk to clients first," said Briscoe. "They can then offer value-added services... or if the problem needs hardware intervention, then they can send to us."

Melbourne reseller The Original PC Doctor was already a partner of Kroll Ontrack and predicts the drop-off model will be a success.

"It's going to work well for both parties," said The Original PC Doctor proprietor John Pititto. "Our staff are knowledgeable about Kroll and why people should choose Kroll."

The other drop-off partners are Rockingham IT Solutions and ioSafe in Perth, and Computer Troubleshooters in Sydney.

Kroll Ontrack's own international research cites 77 percent of resellers nominating data recovery as a growth area in 2014. The survey also boasted that 89 percent of resellers said customers purchased additional products after data recovery projects.

Kroll Ontrack is still open to new channel partners and more drop off locations around Australia.

A four-tiered pricing scheme simplifies the "mystery" of data recoveries for both partners and customers, according to Kroll Ontrack.

Briscoe said "Australia is heavy in Apple device recoveries work – iPhones come to us everyday". He added "We work closely with Apple and WD".

With the proliferation of smartphones, Pititto indeed sees a lot of customers coming in that didn't consider what they would do if the device ever died.

"There's a real mixed bag of media that come in these days for data recovery," said Pititto. "We have customers coming in these days with mobile phones that have been run over, dropped in a fish bowl, or the cat peed on it."

"Kroll really has the best capacity to recover data in Australia."