Anti-cloud vendor ConnectedData eyes 3,000 European VARs
File-sharing tech vendor not content with 200-strong reseller ranks
Off-cloud file-sharing vendor ConnectedData has said it is not content with the few hundred resellers it has in the UK as it fires the gun on its search for up to 3,000 more partners across Europe.
The vendor, which has been in the UK market for about a year, offers primarily SMB customers its Transporter product which it claims is an off-cloud answer to Dropbox.
It already has a few hundred partners in the UK and has distribution deals signed with CMS Distribution, Ingram Micro and Beta Distribution.
The firm's newly appointed channel manager Kevin Vine, who is one of about five home-based UK staff at the firm, said the market the Transporter product is in requires a high number of resellers.
"Currently – either direct or managed through distribution – we have a few hundred resellers who we trade with on a regular basis," he said. "But if you see the target market for NAS [network-attached storage) and direct storage products and the amount of resellers regularly selling those, we have still got a lot of work to do to get to where we think we need to be.
"In Germany [there are] about 5,000 or 6,000 active resellers a month selling that type of product. In the UK, there are about 5,000 active IT resellers and by the time we've stripped out some of those who focus on storage and cloud solutions, there's probably a good 2,000 to 3,000 that we should be after. We need to increase our number in the UK."
Vine said that despite planning to dramatically swell its reseller ranks across the continent, ConnectedData still tries to balance the quantity of partners with the quality of support it offers them.
"We need a balance," he said. "We obviously need resellers we can work with directly – maybe the larger ones where we can put sales focus in – and then those which are serviced by distribution too. We need to work with and through distribution to get that coverage. It's a two-pronged attack."