SimpliVity Debuts Channel Program To Scale Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Business

Hyper-converged infrastructure solution developer SimpliVity on Wednesday unveiled its first formal channel program as a way to more quickly scale the company's business, amid increased competition in this nascent industry.

The SimpliVity PartnerAdvantage program builds on a previous channel partner program with new benefits and streamlined processes, said George Hope, head of global alliances for the Westborough, Mass.-based vendor.

"It's the evolution of the company," Hope told CRN. "We're growing quickly, but we need to scale, so we're going early into the channel."

Related: Gartner Converged Infrastructure Magic Quadrant: Who's In, Who Didn't Make The List

Hyper-converged infrastructure refers to a software stack featuring compute, storage, networking, virtualization and sometimes other resources that runs on commodity hardware to give customers a solution that is managed as a whole rather than through separate management systems.

Hope declined to provide revenue information to back up his claim about SimpliVity's fast growth and instead said the company's employee count grew about 2.5 times in the past six months to about 300 people.

SimpliVity currently has over 150 customers and over 200 channel partners. Hope explained the large partner-to-customer ratio as being due to ongoing partner recruiting efforts.

"We're investing heavily ahead of revenue," he said.

The vendor offered deal registration like most vendors prior to the SimpliVity PartnerAdvantage program, said Steve Johnson, president and CEO of Corus360, an Atlanta-based solution provider and SimpliVity channel partner. Corus360 specializes in working with businesses like SimpliVity, which become market disrupters.

"Then they brought in a group of guys from EMC," Johnson told CRN. "Those guys understand the channel. Not just the need for discounts, but to provide hard dollars back to partners if they drive the business. Those dollars let me offset the costs of hiring extra consultants and finding additional architects to generate new business."

That "group of guys from EMC" Johnson referred to includes Hope, former director of global channels for EMC's Isilon business, and Mitch Breen, a former EMC and Oracle sales executive. Hope and Breen joined SimpliVity in January.

Building a channel presence as quickly as possible is key for SimpliVity to help it counteract much of the competitive buzz in the hyper-converged infrastructure business.

NEXT: How SimpliVity Handles The Hyper-converged Infrastructure Market Competition

The company's biggest competitor, Nutanix, last week signed an OEM agreement with Dell under which Dell is now reselling Nutanix solutions and by the second half of 2014 will OEM Nutanix's software to run on Dell servers.

Meanwhile, storage king EMC and VMware are expected to shortly introduce hyper-converged infrastructure offerings, possibly under the "Project Mystic" or "Project Marvin" moniker.

The OEM deal between Dell and Nutanix worries Johnson as a SimpliVity channel partner, even though his company also partners with those two vendors.

"It scares the heck out of me," he said. "I was a mid-market storage guru back in the day when Dell was a reseller for EMC. Dell is a great company. But this deal means more competition for my company in the hyper-converged infrastructure market. Disruptive technology now has a multi-billion-dollar company behind it."

Hope admitted that Nutanix has enjoyed first-mover advantage, but said SimpliVity has invested the extra time in engineering and building the channel.

The SimpliVity PartnerAdvantage program is a three-tier program that includes a hefty deal registration bonus as well as a 3 percent to 5 percent backend rebate, depending on partner tier, Hope said.

SimpliVity also offers partners the same training received by the company's own employees, as well as on-line training for pre-sales and sales implementation, he said.

Johnson said what he likes most about SimpliVity is the simplicity of the company's solutions and of its partner program.

"SimpliVity offers customers the ability to take hyper-converged infrastructure--including the compute and storage technology--and run their applications without changing the rest of their infrastructure," he said.

Citrix-based and VMware-based virtual desktop infrastructure are the most obvious use cases for SimpliVity, which also offers a great solution for automatically managing remote office IT infrastructures, he said.

"In this disruptive space, there are so many players," he said. "But what's important is who the vendors bring on board. SimpliVity has put quality guys in the local geographies. They're not just doing lunch-and-learns. They're coming in and educating my sellers on use cases and how to start proofs-of-concept. They can help make the sales cycle be 90 days or less if you find the right use cases."