Storage play hopes Aussie channel will drink the Coraid

Just weeks after setting up its Australian headquarters in Sydney, global storage vendor Coraid is gunning to pick up local customers with a go-to-market strategy 100 percent based on the channel.

It’s Coraid’s first foray into the A/NZ market, with Sydney the latest of eight global offices spanning North America, Western Europe and the Asia Pacific.

The local operation, headed by former VMWare services director Jason Martin, already boasts six channel partners helping to manage 25 customers including Sony, Flinders University, the University of Auckland and the University of Tasmania's Australian Maritime College.

Global senior vice president Carl Wright told CRN the company was looking to take advantage of a gap in the storage market by offering competitive pricing and channel incentives.

“We are a scale-out, Ethernet SAN. That means our customers as they need storage can keep adding storage,” he said. “They don’t get huge bills and they don’t have to buy a huge footprint. What this represents is a new economic price point, where we can offer storage that costs less. From a performance perspective we can offer around 2000 megabytes per second for less than $600 per terabyte.”

Coraid’s storage products target mid-range and public organisations with a scale-out Ethernet SAN architecture for high performance computing, video, virtualisation and cloud environments. Coraid’s channel program is modelled on that of partner VMWare, and involves a “quality over quantity” approach as well as a partner program which Wright says offers gold members discounts of 30 per cent and silver members 25 per cent.

“The entire purpose of the model is to ensure channel partners have the best pricing for customers,” he said. “The channel strategy is identical to North America and Western Europe. The value proposition for target customers is identical across all regions, and as a result channel partners we target tend to be the same.”

“We’re more interested in channel partners who are looking at providing a full stack set of capabilities for customers, not people interested in pushing boxes.”

Coraid’s Australian partner list includes Oriel IT Technologies, AGTC Consulting, eBlueprint, Horizon Systems, NSI Technology and Relative Networks. The company is hoping to double its channel over the next twelve months via a heavy investment in personnel, and will study opportunities in Melbourne, Brisbane and New Zealand based on the success of the Sydney office.

“The mix of employees won’t all be the sales guys, there’ll also be guys in field marketing and channel support to make the channel more effective,” Wright said. “We expect to have three systems engineers over the next 12 to 18 months, and a mix of marketing and support people."

Coraid recently enjoyed a $50 million funds injection made up of contributions from existing investors as well as the company's biggest supplier Seagate.