Caringo Beefs Up Partner Program, Adds Channel Executives

**Editor’s Note: Click here for a list of May’s important channel-program changes you should know or here to see which channel people were on the move in May.**

Caringo, the software-defined object storage provider, has enhanced its multi-tiered partner program to provide resellers with more resources and revenue opportunities from sales of its software appliance.

Caringo launched its Connect Partner Program more than 10 years ago and now includes “an arsenal of sales enablement tools, marketing programs, certified training and revenue incentives based on different tier levels,” according to the company. At certain tiers, partners will have the ability to receive qualified opportunities from Caringo’s global sales team and participate in Caringo’s “thought-leadership” initiatives.

In addition, the company added two new dedicated team members to help partners execute joint marketing programs and improve sales opportunities.

Kim Harshbarger, Caringo’s senior partner marketing manager, tells Channel Partners that her company wanted to ensure it has a “world-class program benefiting our partners’ bottom line with increased revenue streams.” The company has more than 70 partners globally, including MSPs, ISVs, resellers, SIs and OEMs.{ad}

“We see partners as an extension of our global sales force and with the increased demand for scale-out storage solutions, we recognized the need to expand our global footprint, and one of the fastest ways to accomplish that is through a robust partner ecosystem,” she said. “The enhanced (program) enables partners to add ongoing revenue streams, improve margins and gain competitive advantage by offering a true scale-out storage solution to their existing customer base. This allows their customers to move away from the chains of legacy storage hardware, gain greater efficiency and lower total cost of ownership while the partner increases pull-through of hardware and services up to four times on each opportunity. We have also updated our deal-registration portal that provides protection for opportunities.”

Rob Unterberger, formerly Transcend Insights’ strategic alliance executive, now is the contact for all partner recruitment opportunities and partner sales engagement matters. Harshbarger, formerly Interactive Intelligence’s marketing manager, strategic alliances, is responsible for partner go-to-market strategy, joint marketing campaigns and …

{vpipagebreak}

… global partner marketing communications.

Offered as a complete software appliance, Caringo Swarm provides a platform for data protection, management, organization and search at massive scale.

“Many partners today are focused on traditional file-and-block storage,” Harshbarger said. “As the data deluge of the 21st century continues, Caringo brings partners a much-needed scale-out storage solution for their customers that need to scale to hundreds of petabytes and beyond, while giving them ease of management and extensive management and search capabilities. The success of our partners contributes to more successful implementations (already at 400-plus), brand awareness and revenue for Caringo.”

“Unstructured data growth has made scale-out storage one of the top technologies requested by our customers,” said Bill Trautman, director of technical services at DataSpan. “Caringo’s support enables us to help our customers protect and extract value from their data at any scale.”