'7 Minutes' with Gena Phelps, Director of Global Channel Marketing, Tintri

**Editor’s Note: “7 Minutes” is a feature where we ask channel executives from startups – or companies that may be new to the Channel Partners audience – a series of quick questions about their businesses and channel programs.**

After a somewhat bumpy IPO, Tintri is moving ahead on plans to break out of the flash storage mold set by the likes of Cohesity/Pure Storage and Tegile — and challenge hyperconverged enterprise cloud platform providers including Nutanix and HPE Simplivity. Earlier this month, it recorded a win when data-center provider Whoa.com replaced NetApp storage with Tintri gear, making it the basis of private and public cloud deployments and a disaster-recovery solution.

Tintri also announced an integration with Cisco UCS Director via a plugin to enable compute, network and storage configuration and management at the virtual machine and vDisk levels.

Tintri’s Gena Phelps

Tintri’s technology is a fit for partners looking to get into the cloud services provider business, as Gena Phelps, the company’s director of global channel marketing, explains in the latest installment of our 7 Minutes series. Its hardware is also targeted at enterprises looking to build their own private clouds.

Data-center spending is set to inch up, according to a June survey of 676 members of the 451 Global Digital Infrastructure Alliance. Fifty-five percent of respondents maintain company-owned or leased data centers and facilities. Almost a third (32 percent) are operating between 76 percent and 100 percent utilization, yet just 18 percent plan to fix that by leasing colocation space. When asked about pain points, more than half cited difficulty responding effectively to changing business requirements — a selling point for hyperconverged infrastructure.

Channel Partners: Tell us what customers love about your product or service. What’s the secret selling sauce?

Gina Phelps: Tintri’s secret sauce is its CONNECT architecture. It’s designed to work like building blocks – similar to public cloud – that customers can easily configure and integrate with their existing infrastructure.

And Tintri largely works in autonomous fashion, meaning customers set it and forget it. For example, Tintri automatically assigns every virtual machine to its own “lane,” so there is never conflict over resources. And when you expand your footprint, Tintri optimizes the placement of every virtual machine. That frees our customers from obsessing about storage, so they can focus on delivering enterprise cloud benefits.

CP: Describe your channel program — metal levels, heavy on certifications, open or selective, unique features?

GP: Tintri operates a program for value-added resellers, including full access to Tintri resources, deal registration, incentive programs, value-added services and certifications. The program offers tiers (Elite, Premier, Authorized, Registered) with program and financial benefits — with clear growth paths and milestones. Tintri also offers a not-for-resale (NFR) purchase program featuring significant discounts on Tintri storage for use in partner labs and demo environments.

Where Tintri really stands apart is our commitment to helping partners build cloud practices. For example, we recently announced a new certification, the Tintri Certified Cloud Expert, which educates partners on …

… APIs and automation. We provide the training and support to help partners create new value-add solutions that help them differentiate and win.

CP: Quick-hit answers: Percentage of sales through the channel, number of partners, average margin. Go.

GP: In our last fiscal year, more than 85 percent of revenue was delivered via the channel. We have more than 380+ channel partners worldwide.

CP: Who are your main competitors, and what makes your offering better?

GP: There’s a temptation to peg Tintri as another all-flash storage company. The reality is that our design – and the way customers put Tintri to work – is very different from conventional storage. Tintri is the backbone of enterprise cloud, a $27 billion market.

There are two fundamental differences between Tintri enterprise cloud and conventional solutions. First is our level of abstraction. Tintri operates in virtual machines and containers — the same units as other enterprise cloud components. That allows for far tighter integration with hypervisors and cloud management. Second is our open APIs, which allow for automation across the infrastructure and the introduction of self-service.

The bottom line is that Tintri delivers the greatest performance for all an enterprise’s workloads, with the least management effort. It allows workloads to be spun up in seconds and for a footprint to scale with total flexibility.

CP: How do you think your technology portfolio will change in the next three years?

GP: Tintri will continue to advance its enterprise cloud platform. We understand that enterprise cloud isn’t about tens or hundreds of virtual machines – it’s about supporting organizations as they scale to thousands, even hundreds of thousands – of virtual machines. And so we will continue to invest in automation to simplify management, analytics to inform increasingly complex decisions and self-service to expand access to infrastructure.

We have a very compelling product road map — stay tuned!

CP: How do you expect your channel strategy to evolve over that timeframe?

GP: We will continue to embrace partners that want to build solutions around enterprise cloud. Our partners aren’t focused on IOPS and dollars-per-gigabyte; we’re investing in partners with a shared vision for the role automation, analytics and self-service can play in an organization’s ability to scale its footprint.

Our top partners spend the time to internalize Tintri’s differentiation, and then they use that to compete and win by offering customers greater business impact. And we will continue to develop training and certifications that help these partners expand their knowledge of enterprise cloud capabilities and add new services.

CP: What didn’t we ask that partners should know?

GP: Partners should know how customers feel about Tintri. We manage a community of more than 1,000 customers through our online hub, so we can keep them informed of new products and engaged with their peers. Our products have changed the way customers work — freed them from management and helped them deploy enterprise cloud. As a result, Tintri is a top-rated solution on third-party review sites, including Gartner Peer Insights, TechValidate and IT Central Station. Customer fanaticism is the ultimate validation of our highly differentiated and impactful enterprise cloud platform.