Panzura Provides Risk-free, No-Cost Data Migration To Its Platform

‘It’s our way of making it easy for customers to adopt Panzura to level up to multi-cloud data management savvy. We will handle all the migration. Normally, that can cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars. We have hired the right people to handle the readiness evaluation and the full-service migration of data to the Panzura environment,’ says Dan Waldschmidt, Panzura’s chief revenue officer.

Data management technology developer Panzura this week is introducing a new program aimed at helping clients migrate their data to the company’s modern global file system at no charge and at no financial risk.

The new Panzura Guarantee gives customers free assessment and readiness services and a 30-day guarantee to implement the technology, said Dan Waldschmidt, chief revenue officer of the San Jose, Calif.-based vendor.

The Panzura Guarantee is the company’s way to get clients to try Panzura’s global file system, which Waldschmidt called more scalable and more easy to implement than competing file systems but costs up to 70 percent less.

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Panzura provides safe, simple, and smart data management by layering governance and analytics on top of the storage layer, and on top of that adding intelligence and logistics, Waldschmidt said.

“The intelligence and logistics layer is similar to a microservice that allows multiple users to collaborate on a file across a company and across multiple companies,” he said.

Panzura is focused on simplicity, performance, and scale, and adds FIPS 140-2 security and immutable storage to protect data, Waldschmidt said.

“Secure data management is not something you should pay for,” he said. “Security isn’t something you should sell, or a service you provide. It should be given.”

The Panzura Guarantee is Panzura’s incentive to get businesses to try its technology on a free and risk-free basis, Waldschmidt said.

“It’s our way of making it easy for customers to adopt Panzura to level-up to multi-cloud data management savvy,” he said. “We will handle all the migration. Normally, that can cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars. We have hired the right people to handle the readiness evaluation and the full-service migration of data to the Panzura environment.”

Panzura is also wrapping IT asset disposition into the Panzura Guarantee, Waldschmidt said.

“For example, if a customer has existing hardware, we’ll move their data and then take the hardware, certify it has been cleansed of the data, sell it, and send the money to the customer,” he said.

If, within 30 days the customer is not satisfied with the Panzura global file system, Panzura will migrate data back to the customer’s previous environment, he said.

Panzura over the seven years CSS has worked with it has proven itself as a provider of seamless storage on the cloud with seamless security and deduplication capabilities, said Ajay Tyagi, executive vice president of the Milpitas, Calif.-based solution provider.

“Support from Panzura has been very responsive,” Tyagi told CRN. “The company is very channel-focused and relationship-focused. They’re not, ‘Here’s the program and documentation. Go do it.’ They help us develop our business.”

The Panzura Guarantee is very important as a way of simplifying implementation of the Panzura technology, Tyagi said.

“They’ve invested in a program with a 30-day rollback guarantee, and one that pays us fast because of the fast implementation,” he said. “This gives us and customers peace of mind.”

The Panzura Guarantee also helps bring more transformation to customers who can try the technology with a 30-day guarantee, Tyagi said.

“I haven’t heard of any other vendors doing that,” he said. “A lot of vendors offer free assessments, or provide reports and lifecycle management. They may even bring in an appliance or more capacity without charge. But those are more commercial transactions. Panzura is focused on the channel, and was cloud-native from the get-go.”

Panzura is looking at making the process easier for customers to adopt the new technology, and less stressful for partners, Tyagi said.

“They’ve removed the friction points for both customers and the channel,” he said.

Panzura, which depends on channel partners for 95 percent or 96 percent of sales, wants to engage its partners who might otherwise need multiple tools to migrate customers’ data to modern platforms, Waldschmidt said.

“The Panzura Guarantee is actually a better model to bill for data as it’s consumed,” he said. “Get the migration done quickly, with no arguments about costs. Customers don’t want to pay these costs. And we are de-risking this for our partners.”

Looking forward, Panzura by year-end expects to introduce version 1 of its new application providing auto ransomware detection and return to operation, Waldschmidt said.

“In under a minute, the software will be able to detect an attack within a few seconds, run users’ protocols to make sure it is a real attack, and then bring back the good data,” he said. “We can do that now, but it takes a few minutes.”