Accellion Joins Microsoft Cloud Storage Partner Program

**Editor’s Note: Click here for a list of February’s important channel-program changes you should know.**

Private cloud company Accellion on Thursday announced it has joined the Microsoft Cloud Storage Partner Program.

The vendor’s content platform, kiteworks, now extends Microsoft Office Online to content stored on premises and in the cloud without having to duplicate files. The features add value to enterprise employees already using Microsoft applications to find, create, edit and share enterprise content that is stored in various on-premises content systems, the company said.

More than 15 million users, and 2,500 corporations and government agencies, use Accellion to enable secure access to enterprise content from any device.

Srinath Sarang, Accellion’s vice president of worldwide market development, tells Channel Partners the integration capabilities with Microsoft Office 365 allow partners to offer joint managed services with Office 365 as a productivity offering, coupled with Accellion’s kiteworks secure access platform.{ad}

“This cross-border collaboration provides value-added SaaS services for our partners,” he said. “In addition, the kiteworks enterprise-grade SDKs and APIs allow global system integrators (SIs) to build custom solutions to improve workflow and productivity. And because these documents are accessed, edited and shared within the kiteworks platform, employees are also able to work securely without fear of a data breach.”

A manufacturing customer, for example, could have an Accellion partner build custom services to pull order information from an enterprise resource planning system like SAP, Sarang said.

“This data could be coupled with metadata such as CAD drawings relating to a part being manufactured,” he said. “The manufacturers could then share and collaborate on this data with their customers and suppliers without having to rely on clunky and insecure means such as FTP or multiple emails.”

Accellion’s partners include VARs, MSPs and SIs. It has approximately 180 registered partners globally that are authorized to conduct business on behalf of Accellion, and a few focus partners also known as its go-to partners. Its partners range in size from large global players down to regional specialists.

“A partner who offers the kiteworks platform is offering value-added services rather than a product,” Sarang said. “Ultimately, kiteworks is more of a vertical-focused solution that draws other solutions into the mix such as storage, DLP solutions, security information and event management (SIEM) solutions and other such services, which obviously means more revenue for the partner.”