DataMirror reflects on need for VARs
Disaster recovery vendor signs resellers for SME sector
Canadian disaster-recovery and protection vendor DataMirror is signing new partners to target the SME sector more effectively.
The firm is looking to boost the share of its revenue coming from the channel, which currently stands at about 30 per cent.
Hamish Macarthur, director at UK storage and security analyst Macarthur Stroud, said the move is potentially well-timed.
"DataMirror has a number of software tools with some attraction, but not enough to force its case as a dominant player, unless it gets more resellers on board," he said.
"The company needs to use the channel more effectively to get the coverage, and thus the traction it needs."
Sam Jacobs, EMEA alliances manager at DataMirror, said special emphasis is being put on signing up partners for the firm's extract transfer and load tool, Transformation Server, and its iReflect clustering package for Oracle environments.
David Clark, director at business intelligence consultancy Simpson Associates, said his company integrates both the Transformation Server from DataMirror and DecisionStream from Cognos, but believes the DataMirror product has distinct advantages over Cognos and other rival offerings.
"In a scenario in which you have five operational databases running, you can consolidate and report on them all by mapping them to a single data warehouse in real time, whereas with the other tools you have to wait until number five has loaded before you can consolidate," he said.
DataMirror has been working with VAR Triangle for 18 months.
Trevor Roberts, sales manager at Triangle, said the reseller's relationship with the Canadian firm began when it began marketing its iCluster product for high availability in DB2 environments.
It has now expanded to Transformation Server for situations where data is coming from disparate databases and needs to be loaded into a data warehouse for use by business intelligence tools such as Cognos, Business Objects or Crystal Decisions.