EMC wants partners to target SMBs with online backup services |
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By Colin Steele, News Writer
04 Apr 2008 | SearchITChannel.com |
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EMC's new effort to attract small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers through channel partners has kicked off with the debut of eFileCabinet's Concentsus Online Backup service.
eFileCabinet, a Provo, Utah-based EMC partner, launched the Concentsus Online Backup service in late March. The service provides a Web portal through which users can manage their storage policies, then automatically backs up the data to remote EMC servers in EMC data centers. Other EMC partners are working on similar Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings, said Roy Sanford, a SaaS vice president with EMC.
The Concentsus Online Backup service is available in three plans -- home, small business and enterprise -- but both eFileCabinet and EMC said their target audience is SMBs.
"EMC does not have a lot of products that they offer to that space, so this is a total greenfield opportunity for partners," Sanford said.
The Concentsus Online Backup service small business plan costs $3.95 per desktop or server, plus 50 cents per gigabyte of stored data per month, up to 100 GBs. The enterprise plan goes for $6.95 per server and $1.75 per gigabyte per month.
EMC's compensation plan for partners who offer online backup services will mirror the discounts partners receive for selling on-premise products and services, Sanford said. The vendor will also offer marketing materials and other sales support.
"EMC's a large company, and they're primarily going after the enterprises and large corporations," said Matt Peterson, eFileCabinet's chief operating officer. "We really think that we can drill down and get thousands and thousands of [SMB] customers, because we already have the market."
The Concentsus Online Backup service is based on the Mozy technology that EMC gained as part of its acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems, Peterson said. EMC has 1,200 Mozy reseller partners, most of which came from that acquisition, according to Sanford.
Some of those partners may resell EMC products through the vendor's Velocity partner program, Sanford said. Conversely, traditional EMC partners are getting more and more into selling online backup services and the Mozy line, he said. EMC provides support and training to both kinds of partners to help facilitate this "cross-pollination," he added.
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