Infinidat, a provider of on-premises storage systems, this week revealed it has doubled the number of partners participating in its global channel program in 2020.
At the same time, Infinidat also announced it has revamped its partner portal as part of an ongoing effort to make sure partners have access to the same training and sales enablement tools as the company’s internal sales team.
Much of the success Infinidat has had in the channel can be attributed to an elastic approach to selling storage, says Mitch Diodato, channel sales director for North America at Infinidat. The company will overprovision storage systems deployed within a local data center. When a customer needs additional storage all the partner needs to do is remote make additional storage capacity available, says Diodato.
“If the customer asks for 500TB we put a petabyte in,” says Diodato.
That approach has proven especially appealing when many IT teams to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic are working remotely from home because it eliminates the need to make a special trip to a data center, notes Diodato.
IT teams are also looking for a lower cost alternative to Flash-based storage systems in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the pandemic, adds Diodato.
Ultimately, Diodato says success in the channel comes down to attaining and maintaining mindshare among partners. That’s difficult to achieve in the absence of physical meeting so Infinidat has made a concerted effort to host online Happy Hour events with partners, says Diodato. Roughly 85% of the company’s revenue is moving through channel partners, notes Diodato.
It’s not clear in-person meetings with channel partners will be occurring with any regularity any time soon. In the meantime, channel executives and partners alike would do well to learn how to master new communications mediums. After all, IT platforms are going to sell themselves any time soon.
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