Tegile hunts for partners as it ramps up channel expansion

Storage vendor targeting EMC and NetApp as it expands in UK

Flash storage vendor Tegile is looking for up to 10 new partners in the UK, who preferably have skills in virtualisation.

The vendor has around 35 partners in the UK currently, and its vice president EMEA, Paul Silver, said that it is on the hunt for between five and 10 more partners this year.

He said: "Primarily it is about channel expansion in the UK this year. If we got another five or 10 partners that would be great. What we don't want it is 200, and them bumping into each other and losing interest.

"We want fully enabled partners. It's a bit like cooking: instead of just throwing the cookery book at someone and saying, ‘there's the kitchen', we join them and show them what to do."

Silver added that Tegile is looking for partners that are already skilled in virtualisation, so that it is easier for resellers to combine Tegile's solutions with other vendors' products.

"What we don't want is someone who just sells from a catalogue," he explained. "It's a bit like a McDonald's meal: you buy the burger with chips and a drink, but we only make the burger. So we want to make sure that from start to finish, the whole solution can be sold by that reseller."

Tegile was founded in 2010 and entered the UK market in 2012. Its chief marketing officer, Narayan Venkat, said that a lot of its contract wins recently have been replacing EMC and NetApp solutions.

He said: "We are seeing a massive transformation happening in the data centre. Systems are going through a lot of change, primarily because of flash. We go up against the incumbents like EMC and NetApp.

"Our value proposition to customers is we can deliver five to 10 times more performance at the same economics that the incumbents do. Where we are winning is we are starting to replace a number of existing incumbents like NetApp and EMC."

Tony Lock (pictured), distinguished analyst at Freeform Dynamics, said that while companies may be installing Tegile solutions, he thinks that most of them will be adding to their existing solutions rather than replacing them.

He explained: "I expect that they are not replacing in every instance. Storage requirements are growing, people take in new equipment without replacing old storage. The fact that someone is buying Tegile equipment today means they are putting in new equipment but whether they are retiring old equipment at the same time is interesting. Most won't be.

"I think Tegile are a very interesting company. Storage is a very active market. Tegile are trying to provide people with more flexibility, which hasn't been what people historically wanted with storage. We have seen over the course of the last three or four years companies are introducing more flexibility into their storage solutions so that people can be more adaptable. There is an awful lot going on. It is probably the most active market in the entire infrastructure."