DataCore treats ailing UK channel with new direct sales team

Vendor hopes leads sourced by direct staff will help the UK channel business step up to the bar set by European counterparts

Storage vendor DataCore has brought in a flurry of direct sales staff charged with generating leads and passing them to resellers that have been too "busy doing their own thing" to find their own.

Over the past few years, DataCore's UK channel strategy has come under scrutiny, with resellers pointing to unrest in its channel business and even its own execs claiming to have been unlucky in the country thanks to consolidation among its distributors.

The firm said that in the UK, revenue growth has been at about 10 per cent over the last year, but it is lagging behind the likes of Italy and Germany whose figures are closer to 50 per cent.

But its chief executive George Teixiera said he has high hopes for the UK market as customers become more comfortable with its "software-defined" message thanks to the likes of EMC and VMware shouting about the trend.

"We don't have to re-educate the market now," he said. "The market has heard about ‘software-defined' technology and now we go in and say ‘you've heard about it, now let's show you what it can do'. [Direct teams] will then give those leads to partners. In the past we got too dependent on the existing channel – they were busy doing their own thing."

He said he hopes the new DataCore sales staff will rejuvenate its sluggish UK channel.

"Part of the problem was that we were not feeding enough leads to the channel," he said. "So we've hired inside salespeople who are working the phones.

"The problem is we haven't really grown the channel base as much as I'd have liked and we depended on them to get their own leads. But in the UK market, we need to do the lead finding and work really hard at it."

Customers have traditionally been keen to buy big-brand kit such as EMC, VMware, HP and Dell in the UK, added Teixiera, who said that what was once a problem has turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

"We've had a hard time getting the mindset to change [towards smaller firms]," he said. "But in a funny way, since the VMware and EMC announcements about ‘software-defined' tech, we've seen an increase in leads – in the UK they're up by about 50 per cent.

"Customers are calling us up and saying ‘what does ‘software-defined' mean?"

He added that DataCore has the chance to pip tech giants to the post on "software-defined" tech sales now because it first placed its bets on the technology when the firm was founded 16 years ago.

"In the case of EMC, they are promising a lot right now but can't deliver a lot of it," he said. "[We] tend to be half the price and 10 times faster and add a lot more capability."