Exablox bears reseller gifts as it wins first UK deal

Scale-out storage vendor offering resellers £200 a lead and free trips to Las Vegas as it ramps up in UK

Having closing its first UK deal, storage newcomer Exablox is offering resellers £200 for each qualified lead they bring in.

The California-based vendor, which bills itself as the industry's only on-premises scale-out NAS for small and mid-size organisations, recently signed Beta Distribution as its first UK distributor and this week celebrated its first UK customer win, with an unnamed university.

Beta claims it has already built a healthy pipeline for Exablox's kit with eight UK resellers it has signed up and trained on the vendor's behalf under a soft launch.

Under an incentive scheme, open to all resellers, sales staff will be treated to a trip to Las Vegas if they sell £45,000-worth of Exablox kit between 1 July and 30 September. They will also bag £200 for every qualified lead they bring in, even if it does not result in a sale; and can earn up to 28 per cent margin for deal-registered opportunities.

Ricky Patel, business manager, enterprise at Beta Distribution, said Exablox was not as feature-rich as Isilon but, at £10,000, has a starting price he said is more in reach of cost-conscious end users.

"Exablox is seen as Isilon-lite in the US," he said.

"It has the functions and features which place it above the likes of Synology, QNAP, and Buffalo but just under the likes of Isilon, Nimble and Pure due to starting price point and having key functions built into the product. There are options that can be enabled which can help compete with other manufacturers, but the key is the object storage technology that Exablox uses."

Exablox's first UK contract, a 50TB deal with a university won through a reseller in the north of England, was inked this morning, Patel said.

"It took three weeks from engagement to closing the deal," he added.