Elastifile stretches into European channel with distributor signing

Hybrid storage start-up says it intends to seek further funding later this year

Hybrid cloud storage start-up Elastifile has signed BigTec as its first European distributor, citing its pedigree growing the channel for the likes of Rubrik and Nutanix as a key motivation.

The Israeli vendor, which claims its software can help firms move to the public cloud and prevent cloud lock-in, has raised $65m (£50m) in funding over the past 12 months, and launched a UK office in January.

Elastifile's sales director Eddie Galvan said that BigTec's success building sales for other storage start-ups made it a natural ally.

"BigTec have done it before, basically," he said. "We want to successfully penetrate not just the UK market but the European market: we've signed an agreement with them across Europe. I'd describe them as an unconventional distributor, meaning they roll up their sleeves and actually generate opportunities and really assist in the sales effort."

Elastifile's software is designed to remove barriers for businesses moving to public cloud, and prevent cloud lock-in, by providing a "tapas-type menu" of integrated public cloud access.

"If [resellers] have customers that are moving to the public cloud, one of the big inhibitors is that they have to re-factor their applications in order for them to run in AWS or Google, or move to a new application, which can be very costly or time consuming," Galvan explained.

"We enable their customers to move those workloads to the public cloud without this, then save them money on resources in the public cloud when running those applications there, and thirdly, enable them to avoid getting locked into cloud vendors like AWS, by providing the ability to seamlessly move back if needs be."

Galvan said that Elastifile, whose financial backers include Dell, Cisco and Lenovo, currently has the bandwidth to take on only about 10 reseller partners across the region.

But the vendor will likely conduct another round of funding at the back-end of 2017 aimed specifically at scaling out its sales and channel teams, he added.

"We want to find resellers that share the same kind of vision that we have, which is trying to help customers on that journey to the public cloud, and enabling them to create a hybrid cloud architecture," Galvan said. "Not all the resellers in the UK are there yet in terms of trying to address those customer requirements."