Arcserve’s New Channel Hire Shares Goals and Vision

Lynn Haber

**Editor’s Note: Click here to see which channel people were on the move in August.**

Three years after CA Technologies divested of its CA arcserve data-protection business, Arcserve has had some executive departures and arrivals — most recently, the departure of CEO Mike Crest effective Sept. 8, and the arrival of Nancy Patterson, director of North America marketing, whose job responsibilities include the channel.

Patterson, just three weeks into the job, takes over for Scott Stano, who previously served in dual roles as director for global demand generation and North America marketing and is now focused on the global demand generation function. He’s been with the company since its inception. The vendor appointed Dave Hansen, the company’s chairman of the board, as interim CEO.

About a year ago, the company added four executives to its global product development, finance and strategic alliance divisions to advance its double-digit growth strategy.

Arcserve recently announced two acquisitions, Zetta in July, and FastArchiver in April.

Arcserve’s Nancy Patterson

The new director of North America marketing is no stranger to the channel, having held positions in channel development, enablement and marketing for the past 20 years. We caught up with Patterson to find out her plans for Arcserve’s North American partners. The company has 7.500 partners worldwide, but doesn’t share details of how the numbers break down by geography. 

Channel Partners: Let’s start with getting to know Nancy Patterson.

Nancy Patterson: I’ve been working in technology companies my entire career, more than 20 years. Mostly I’ve been focused on marketing roles, and channel program development roles with some time spent in channel sales for these companies, in lots of different industries — data storage and storage networking, unified communications and telecom, and most recently in the secure identity management space at Entrust Datacard.

I developed my passion early on working with different kinds of partners because I see the impact that good partnerships can have for a company. ’ve seen many partnering models, and I’ve seen what works, what doesn’t work, and at the end of the day, I’m thrilled to be here at Arcserve and with the Arcserve team.

CP: What’s been the company’s channel strategy to date?

NP: When I look at the program and the partnerships that have been established since the company was founded, the focus is 100-percent channel. Today, we have a variety of VARs, large account resellers, distributor and also MSP partners. Going forward, we’ll continue on that path, and in terms of strategy and routes to market, when we look at our product sets and the end customers they serve, you can see that there [are] more cloud services in our offering. So, we may look at …

… other additional partnership types and models, whether they’re cloud-only types of partnerships, but we’ll kind of stick to our knitting because we’re interested in growing with what we have.

Some of our partners will choose to sell cloud solutions and others will not. We want to make it feasible and easy for our partners to satisfy the needs of their end customers regardless of what product they’re selling.

CP: Do you expect to make any changes to the Arcserve partner program?

NP: The company’s partner program was launched in May 2015, so it’s been in place for two years. We work with our partners through our sole distributor partner in North America — Ingram Micro. We work closely with them in recruitment activities, so a lot of the VARs that we have today in [North America] – the MSPs, even to a certain extent – the large account resellers, have been a result of us working together with Ingram to identify who would be a good match.

The program is a tiered mode. Based on a partner’s investment in us, they receive benefits according to their level in the program — that could be marketing dollars, deal registration, additional discounts and a variety of things in terms of sales and technical training benefits, and the overall joint marketing that we do together with co-funding to help do that.

CP: What’s your vision for the channel and what are your top objectives?

NP: As we look at the last 12 months, Scott [Stano] and his team and others have done a lot to enhance the program, and when I look at what they’ve done, I expect to leverage that fully with the channel. Those things are in the area of brand positioning and educating our partners about the differentiation that Arcserve brings with its products and as a company; and then, partner program advancements themselves, such as content marketing that aligns our sales and marketing materials with the buyer life cycle, and nurturing campaigns that generate leads for our partners — that’s a huge part of our DNA. So when partners get a lead from us, they know that it’s been thoroughly vetted and qualified. There was also a re-architecting of our partner portal to make it a better user experience for partners.

When I look at the foundation that was set and the enhancements that were made last year, I look at the next 12 months as a major recruiting effort for us to build out additional partnerships to cover solution sets and verticals where we may have gaps. Then, customer enablement. The DNA of this company, in addition to the other things I mentioned, is to look at that customer focus — the end customer who is implementing our solutions every day, i.e., is it easy to use? Does it exceed their expectations? That is a great place to start so that we can enable our partners to help their customers achieve that.

We’re also going to focus on verticals. So, in our marketing, we’ll address the needs of verticals so you’ll see that unfold over the next 12-18 months. What we’ll have to do here is identify priority verticals, because our solution is very broad. We’ll prioritize where we have the greatest opportunity for impact and we’ll engage our partners that way so they can satisfy customer needs.

When you have the right message that speaks to their business needs and solving their business problems, and [bring] it to a particular vertical be it education or health care, it has a greater impact and …

…makes more sense in terms of their world and what they need to do. We’ve had some success educating our partners around verticals such as K-12 and post-secondary education. And, in my short time here, I’ve heard requests for a focus on the health-care space.

CP: So to summarize your top three priorities?

NP: Customer focus; recruitment of new partners to make sure that we’re covering gaps in product sets, geographies or verticals; and then, lastly, addressing our marketing with the needs of vertical markets — where we’d do our lead generation around and our marketing events basically creating that story and message of how we solve business problems for the needs of various verticals. 

CP: Did Arcserve blend Zetto partners into the Arcserve program?

NP: The UDP Cloud Direct, formerly Zetta partners, were rolled into the [North America] Arcserve program and have the ability to sell the entirety of the Arcserve solution portfolio. Their technology will be available to all of our partners and it strengthens the offer that we and our partners have for end customers. What we’ve seen with the integration and launch in North America is significant on the part of our partners wanting to sell the cloud direct solution and become educated, work with our people and go after more opportunities.

We rolled out training and a lot of the lead-gen activity that we’re executing generates leads for that product line, which we’re now sharing with our partners to help jump-start their business.

We’ll be rolling out the Zetta solutions, which we call Cloud Direct, in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) in the October time frame. Rollout for Japan will be in the fall.