Hitachi: Resellers without cloud skills will struggle

Hitachi Data Systems has announced plans to invest heavily in helping its partners chase the cloud storage market next year.

"Partners that don't have key skills in the cloud space are really going to struggle," said Wendy Watkinson (pictured), channel director for Australia and New Zealand at Hitachi Data Systems (HDS).

The channel strategy would educate partners in the skills required for selling and implementing cloud storage which included consulting, assessment and reclamation.

Cloud storage was "a key play for us," explained Watkinson.

The vendor also launched a scholarship program last quarter to target partners that were committed to Hitachi. The vendor was assessing its key partners to find "a number of individuals" who would participate in the program which would include pre-sales, technical training, installation and configuration.

HDS claimed it was one of the fastest growing vendors in the modular storage space with double digit growth.

The vendor was also concentrating on two other drivers beside cloud; unstructured data and storage virtualisation.

Unstructured data was a growing market as businesses struggled to stay on top of their information, Watkinson said. The vendor surveyed 400 companies and found that 34 percent had data growth that was negatively impacting business. A third of respondents couldn't find emails older than 18 months.

Hitachi was targeting partners with strong file and content skills. "We are looking for partners who can define customers' growth pain points," Watkinson said.

Storage virtualisation was another opportunity. While many companies had virtualised their servers, few had started on virtualising their storage, she said. "To get good TCO (total cost of ownership) companies need to implement virtualisation across the whole stack," Watkinson said.

Hitachi was putting marketing dollars into toolkits to help partners focus on these three areas.

Other initiatives included a leadership forum on strategy, sales "boot camps" and consultation training.

"A lot of partners want to do business consulting but don't know how to get there," Watkinson said.