CDW, TWCs NaviSite, Infosys Sign New Vendor Partnerships

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

By Edward Gately

Three channel vendors this month announced strategic partnerships aimed at strengthening their offerings in cloud conferencing, data management and protection, and mobile content. As a result, partners have access to more services.

First, cloud-based conferencing provider Blue Jeans Network, has added tech distributor CDW to its partner program. The team-up means that CDW partners can sell the Blue Jeans service to their customers. It’s available via a free trial.

“There is a synergy in our go-to-market strategy,” said Krish Ramakrishnan, CEO and co-founder, Blue Jeans Network. “CDW sells the way we sell and their team understands the value video collaboration brings to their customers; streamlining video deployments, minimizing maintenance, reducing IT costs and making it easy for anyone to host their own meetings.”

Second, CommVault has a new agreement with NaviSite, the managed services-provider arm of Time Warner Cable, extending CommVault’s Simpana data-protection capabilities to NaviSite’s NaviCloud portfolio. CommVault will provide data protection and management capabilities for customers using NaviCloud Director, an enterprise-class, infrastructure-as-a-service solution. It’s offered to customers via a self-service portal or delivered with NaviSite managed services.

“Our clients come to us for solutions that can readily scale to meet their enterprise level requirements, while reducing risk and providing value back to the business,” said David Grimes, chief technology officer, NaviSite. “Simpana software satisfies our requirements and provides the capabilities of multiple point products we were evaluating within a single solution – providing a great degree of flexibility for our clients, while resulting in less complexity and costs for our internal organizations.”

Third, cloud-services provider Accellion has partnered with Infosys, the consultant and systems integrator, to establish a Center of Excellence around the Accellion’s kiteworks mobile content platform.

Through this partnership, Infosys will use kiteworks to help its clients and consultants create customized enterprise mobile and enterprise cloud apps. The Center of Excellence will include trained consultants on kiteworks technology and provide consultants with the framework to build applications, connectors and extensions to kiteworks’ mobile content platform.

In addition, Infosys has integrated its Mobile Digital Content solution with the kiteworks platform in order to offer enterprises secure mobile access to content stored in Enterprise Content Management systems or cloud-storage systems.

Accellion competes with Box, Dropbox and other file-sharing companies in the cloud.