StorPoint to recruit in wake of name change
Reseller changes its name to Union Solutions to prevent it from being pigeonholed
VAR StorPoint has changed its name to Union Solutions and recruited major players to its vendor portfolio.
StorPoint launched following a management buy-out by channel veteran Jason Rabbetts, of the product and infrastructure arm of GlassHouse, as revealed exclusively by CRN earlier this year. The name change, which occurred officially last week, is to prevent the VAR becoming pigeonholed, Rabbetts explained.
“Storage is our heritage, but storage is about consolidation and the world is now about aggregation and virtualisation, which isn’t concentrated solely in the storage arena,” he said. “We wanted our name to reflect our capabilities in these areas too.”
Rabbetts said the firm has signed with IBM and EMC, as well as other major players on the infrastructure side and some younger firms for virtualisation. “The end-user market has had 10 years of storage education so they know it can cause them big problems and SAN and NAS are now almost standard infrastructure. Now technology has moved and there are some great start-ups building on this infrastructure – these are with whom we have partnered.”
Rabbetts said the firm now intends to become more aggressive in terms of customer acquisition and start to recruit more staff. “We had a good year last year and we have a good cash position. I want to take on XploITe and go head to head with it.”
Ian Smith, chief executive of XploITe, said: “We turn over £60m a year and are in a different league to StorPoint at the moment. However, I have a lot of time for Jason and I am sure he will be successful.”