SVA Software Targets IBM Resellers With Velocity Partner Program

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

SVA Software, a provider of storage performance-management software, is making it North America debut on Tuesday, along with a new partner program to capitalize on the demand for BVQ, its flagship product.

The SVA Velocity Partner Program offers new revenue opportunities for SIs and channel partners to deliver performance and capacity monitoring and analysis for IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and the IBM Storwize family including V9000, V7000, V5000 and V2700, the company said.

Don Mead, SVA’s senior vice president of technology and partner development, tells Channel Partners that SVA was founded earlier this year and its parent company, SVA System Vertrieb Alexander GmbH in Germany, developed its product about 10 years ago.

“About four years ago, their customers started saying, ‘We want this product installed all the time for proactively protecting our environment,’” he said. “And throughout the years, they’ve been fine-tuning this product. They have hundreds of installs throughout the world, and they started getting requests in the United States for the same solution. But it’s very difficult to have a company in Germany and service U.S.-based customers, so they reached out to Jo (McCausland, senior vice president of partner sales) and I to help them establish a company, and then bring this product to the IBM space that has SVC and Storwize. And that’s how we got here. We like to tell that story because people think, ‘2016, brand-new product, how tested is this?’ … It’s a very tested and true solution.”{ad}

BVQ (Business Volume Qualicision) provides visibility into the performance, health and utilization of the entire IBM virtualized infrastructure.

The partner program provides channel partners with sales and support training, product resources and marketing support to “build a successful practice to sell BVQ,” according to SVA. Included in the program is the turnkey offering to deliver the BVQ Health Check, which analyzes a customers’ current storage state.

“We know what it takes to have a good, solid channel program,” Mead said. “I’ve been speaking to partners for 20 years, and what they want is something simple that’s easy to understand and where they can have quick turnaround on sales, and make big margins and make sure they have the protection that they need. So we designed our program with that in mind.”

McCausland said SVA is not trying to “do partners by the pound,” but is trying to find …

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… a few key resellers that have services capabilities.

“Because we are a German company, we don’t want to grow our support and services organization extensively, but we will probably have one or two people eventually who do the implementations and the assessments, and analytics for us here in the United States,” she said. “But our goal is to really enable the partners to deliver these services on their own.”

SVA currently is working with Sirius Computer Solutions, Mark III Systems and Mainline, and is looking for a few regional partners where those companies don’t have a big presence, McCausland said.

“The product right now and at least for the next 18 months or so is really focused on the IBM Spectrum storage family, which is the SVC and Storwize products, so we’re of course going after IBM resellers and ones that have enterprise customers,” she said. “But, we are talking to some of the partners about bundling BVQ into like the V5000 as something that they can deliver a complete solution and provide a quarterly assessment or biannual assessment where they can just derive a lot of services revenue.”