Delphix Expands Channel Program

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

Data virtualization and masking provider Delphix on Tuesday announced an expansion of its channel program. In a briefing, Denise Zelt, the company’s senior manager of channel programs, said the company is focused on enablement and growing the percentage of sales coming through partners. A channel veteran, Zelt has been with Delphix for nine months and previously held leadership roles at Hitachi Data Systems and Convergys.

She acknowledges that data-virtualization technology is still relatively new but says partners are finding it solves a number of problems for customers. Delphix can help companies that depend on SQL databases with archiving, cloud migrations, data-center consolidation, business agility, and security and compliance.

A production database is ingested into the Delphix engine. As changes are made, this mirrored instance is automatically updated. The full production database may then be cloned through a simple, self-service user interface – quickly, from any point in time and without consuming additional storage – and presented to developers, testers, business analysts or whomever needs it.

Because the Delphix engine is presented as storage, the original database believes it’s talking to a storage device. Disposable, virtualized instances can be quickly spun up and deleted, so the customer is not paying to store multiple copies. And, integrated data masking means sensitive information, such as Social Security numbers, can be obfuscated while maintaining the database structure, meaning these images can be stored in the cloud or shared with offshore teams. Without masking, sensitive information would need to be replaced with synthetic data, but that can hinder analysis. Delphix also offers tokenization.{ad}

Delphix works with AWS, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 and SAP. NoSQL databases like Cassandra or MongoDB are not currently supported.

Pete Chargin, the company’s VP of product marketing, told Channel Partners that the product is not just for developers and testers; it can help any company that wants to make better use of, and better protect, large production databases. Chargin cites a university customer with a 1 TB database that wanted to improve analysis.

“Working with that amount of data is just hard,” he says. “It just takes a long time to send that through a pipe.”

The product may also save significantly on storage, as it does data deduplication at the application instead of the filesystem level. A partner or IT team could use the product to quickly restore a deleted or damaged database, or dig into …

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… the root cause of an application problem related to the back-end database without impacting the production system.

Zelt says partners may now engage on an associate/referral level, as a reseller, as a full alliance partner or as a services professional that really dives into customer use cases. Delphix is interested in helping partners build services on top of the product. Examples include supporting distributed development teams, providing data masking for security, easing cloud migrations by making structured data more portable and minimizing storage demands, and adding Delphix to a backup and disaster-recovery service. Large production databases are the crown jewels of a customer’s infrastructure, so enabling almost instant restores is a significant value add.

The system may be deployed either fully in the cloud, on premises or run in a hybrid model. While banking and financial services are the hottest vertical for Delphix, Chargin says health care, retail, oil and gas, and consumer packaged goods are also promising markets. The baseline for the technology is small enterprises on up; 30 percent of the Fortune 500 are customers. The company was founded in 2008 and has raised about $120 million in venture funding from investors including In-Q-Tel, Greylock Partners and Battery Ventures.

Zelt says Delphix has added employees dedicated to partner education and announced additional Partner University events. The digital learning program boasts 27 courses, with tailored perspectives on how Delphix serves a variety of global markets and specific industries.  

“We rely on our partners to help demonstrate how moving that data can be done better and faster with Delphix,” says Zelt. “We value our partners immensely, and this partner program demonstrates the heightened commitment we place on our partners’ success.” 

Follow editor in chief @LornaGarey on Twitter.