By partnering with Marathon disaster recovery software vendor for both physical and virtual servers, and storage networking vendor DataCore Software, the distributor can now offer virtualisation from the desktop PC through to the server and datacentre.

Michael O’Hara, managing director of DataSolutions, told CRN: “Marathon already had resellers in Ireland but not a distributor, so it chose to partner with DataSolutions.

“Now with Marathon and DataCore, DataSolutions can offer a full end-to-end virtualisation offering, from the datacentre through to the desktop,” he said.

Since Citrix acquired XenSource in August, DataSolutions has experienced a 200 per cent increase
in sales enquiries, as it is the sole distributor of the Citrix XenServer in Ireland, according to O’Hara.

The acquisition has benefited DataSolutions as Citrix is a more recognised brand in the market, he added.

Nick Turnbull, director of sales at Marathon ­ a strategic partner of XenSource, said due to this acquisition Marathon needed more channel partners and chose to adopt a two-tier model in the Irish region, already used throughout Europe, Scandinavia and the Middle East.

“There is a vast amount of knowledge on VMware at the moment, but not much about virtualisation.
Education of our products is important, so the reseller can take it on board and enter a sales opportunity as a trusted adviser,” Turnbull said.

“Education of virtualisation will also help the channel as the virtualisation market evolves,” he added.

DataCore Software also recently signed with resellers Bluesource and Netforce.

Nick Broadbent, UK managing director of EMEA operations at DataCore, said: “Building up a partner base is always important and DataCore is following that policy by continuing to recruit partners in areas it was not in before.”

“VMware made virtualisation acceptable. People are now complementing that with what else they can offer such as consolidation of disks and allowing customers more hardware choice,” he added.