XIOTech tries new order of Magnitude
US vendor revises its strategy two years after entering Europe
US SAN vendor XIOtech has admitted it has virtually no channel strategy in the UK or Europe, more than two years after launching into the region.
The firm, which was previously a wholly owned subsidiary of Seagate, said then that it would be a purely channel orientated company.
However, speaking to CRN last week, chief executive Alain Andreoli said: "XIOtech is now a totally independent company. We have done very little business outside the US.
"We had no headcount or offices in the UK, have not looked for partners and, as far as I know, had no strategy to do so until I joined the company four months ago."
The vendor is now attempting to entice resellers by offering them the ability to set their own margins, as it opens offices in the UK, France and Germany and recruits channel support staff.
Bob Wilson, XIOtech's head of worldwide channel sales for Magnitude 3D storage devices, said partners will be able to set their own margins and offer customers an attractive basic package that includes free maintenance for the first three years.
"Our ideal partner understands storage and ideally, NAS. It will have as much sales and technical support expertise as post-sales and support," he said.
"It will probably be vertically aligned in health, manufacturing or education, for example. But mostly, it will be geographically focused or have visibility at an enterprise departmental level."
Hamish Macarthur, managing director of analyst Macarthur Stroud, said: "[XIOtech] really has to get the message through to the reseller base that there is an opportunity out there to sell SAN solutions.
"It is still one of the fastest growing market areas, as users are trying to find better ways of protecting and reducing the cost of storing their data."
Andreoli said: "The US SAN market has a mid-market saturation level of about 60 per cent. In Europe it is about 30 per cent and our machine is gaining traction."
He said for those mid-tier organisations that already have some kind of SAN deployed in their infrastructure, the ability to aggregate capacity, virtualise and load balance it across systems with a lower cost of ownership would be attractive.
XIOtech's Magnitude devices provide distributed clustered storage with a virtualised 'zero-server' footprint.
The vendor claims this removes the need for management software within the server infrastructure for executing distributed, cluster-wide fail-over and fast backup and restore capabilities.