VIPRE Transforms Channel Business For

Q. What is your channel philosophy?

A. We are committed to empower our partners by providing them all business, technical and marketing support needed. We are humbled by the responsibility to provide the right environment to help them grow. We call it the VIPRE Partner Community because we are looking to build more than just a network, but a community of happy, inspired partners that have no barriers in front of them to be successful with our teams and solutions. In a nutshell, we want our partners to see value in VIPRE and to really enjoy working with us.

Q. Why did you get into the channel?

A. I love the channel because of the relationships. I have worked both sides of the channel and I really enjoy building partnerships that are good for all. The IT channel community is so unique and special that there’s nothing like it in the world.

Q. What are your plans for VIPRE partners in 2023?

A. Since July of last year, we made an eight-figure investment into our channel business. In such a short time, we launched our new partner program, revamped our partner portal, doubled our channel sales team, restructuring them regionally to better assist our partners. We also aligned our named/end user sales teams to our channel organization for co-selling and collaboration and opened our product portfolio to make it easier to sell the entire suite of VIPRE solutions. This year, we are going to continue to drive business by investing in a detailed distribution strategy, creating an influencer program to work closer with non-traditional channels and adding new functionality into our PRM system. We are also excited to launch our inaugural partner council to solicit feedback on our go-to-market strategies and our product roadmaps.

Q. Why should the channel be excited about VIPRE?

A. VIPRE is very special place because we’re a great company. We have amazing solutions, and our team is full of incredible people. For someone who has been doing this for a while, I know that does not come around often. Add that to our channel fanatical go to market I am excited to share this with our existing partners and future partners to come.

Marc Malafronte Director of

The shift to cloud-based software continues to accelerate as businesses increasingly take a SaaS-first approach to software consumption to replace on-premises legacy systems and implement new ones with advanced functionality. Here are 20 innovative companies leading the charge in 2023.—Rick Whiting

Aparavi

Adrian Knapp Founder, CEO

Unstructured data can account for up to 80 percent of an organization’s data— much of it hidden “dark data.” Aparavi has been gaining attention with its data intelligence and automation platform that identifies, classifies and optimizes unstructured data wherever it resides, helping businesses mitigate risk and reduce costs and storage.

Drata

Adam Markowitz

Co-Founder, CEO

Drata provides a compliance and automation platform that businesses use to ensure adherence to regulatory and security frameworks. The system automates compliance operations and evidence collection, using monitoring integrations across SaaS services to create a single view of applications, devices and risk.

Informatica

Amit Walia CEO

Informatica is a longtime player in the data management and integration space and is continuing that role with its flagship Intelligent Data Management Cloud platform as more data—and more data operations— move to the cloud. Its portfolio includes tools for data management, quality, governance and transformation.

Robert Bearden

CEO

Cloudera bills itself as the hybrid data company, providing its Cloudera Data Platform as the foundation for a range of data services including data analytics, data management and machine learning. In August Cloudera launched CDP One, a SaaS data lakehouse that enables self-service analytics and data science tasks.

Scott Brown President, CEO

FinancialForce said its cloud-native ERP and professional services applications provide a customer-centric view of a business’ operations. Its applications are built on Force.com, the Salesforce cloud platform. The FinancialForce portfolio includes cloud ERP software for accounting, billing and supply chain management.

Michael Gold CEO

Intermedia, a cloud communications company, o ers a range of integrated collaboration and unified communications offerings including voice, videoconferencing, chat, contact center, business email, file sharing and archiving, and security. Channel-centric Intermedia sells its services through more than 7,200 partners.

Spencer Kimball Co-Founder, CEO

Cockroach Labs is a standout among the wave of next-gen database systems. The company’s CockroachDB is a cloudnative, distributed SQL database that’s designed to handle application workloads with huge volumes of transactional data. The company has raised more than $633 million in funding since its 2015 founding.

George Fraser Co-Founder, CEO

As more data becomes increasingly scattered across cloud and on-premises systems, pulling it all together is a challenge. FiveTran’s automated data movement platform uses extract and load technology to centralize data, replicates it in databases and SaaS applications and performs integrated data transformations.

Intuit

Sasan Goodarzi CEO

Intuit’s QuickBooks portfolio is the operating backbone for many small businesses, including QuickBooks Online applications for managing income and expenses, invoices and more. The company is now also o ering QuickBooks Commerce for managing omnichannel sales and is adding AI capabilities across its applications.

Ali Ghodsi Co-Founder, CEO

Databricks is a leading proponent of the data lakehouse, a system that combines elements of traditional data warehouses and data lakes for a range of analysis, engineering, AI, machine learning and governance tasks. Databricks has been working with partners to develop vertical industry solutions around its Databricks Lakehouse Platform.

GitLab

Sid Sijbrandij Co-Founder, Chair, CEO

GitLab’s DevSecOps platform is designed to shorten application cycle times, reduce development costs and improve productivity. It integrates the application development process from planning, coding and testing new software through the release, deployment and monitoring phases— all surrounded by a layer of security.

MongoDB

Dev Ittycheria President, CEO

MongoDB has been gaining attention with its MongoDB Atlas multi-cloud database and developer data platform for building enterprise, data-centric applications. The company has established extensive alliances with the major cloud platform providers including Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Tristan

Handy Founder, CEO

Startup Dbt Labs provides data transformation and analytics engineering software that works within cloud data warehouses to produce trusted data sets for data analytics and reporting, machine learning modeling and operational workflows. Its development framework combines modular SQL with software engineering best practices.

IGEL

Jed

CEO

Ayres

IGEL OS is a hardwareagnostic, managed endpoint OS designed for secure access to any digital workspace, including VDI, Desktop as a Service and cloud workspaces. IGEL is driving to make the nextgen edge OS the standard for Windows workspace computing across any device or cloud.

Marc Benio Chair, CEO

Salesforce has continued to expand its cloud reach through such blockbuster acquisitions as Tableau, MuleSoft and Slack that have extended its cloud portfolio. The recent launch of DevOps Center helps developers build, test and deploy custom apps on the Salesforce platform that tap into realtime customer data.

Christian Klein CEO

SAP has been moving its customers to the cloud with such flagship products as the SAP S/4HANA Cloud suite of ERP applications, the SAP Business Technology Platform, and cloud applications for supply chain management, human capital management and CRM, among others.

Bill McDermott Chairman, CEO

As businesses undertake digital transformation initiatives, they often find that traditional software can be too inflexible. ServiceNow’s cloud computing platform is used to digitize, automate and manage siloed business processes and workflows, including processes for IT service operations.

Frank Slootman

Chairman, CEO

Snowflake has become a leading force in the data service provider space with its data cloud platform that businesses use to unite siloed data, discover and securely share it, and execute a range of analytic workloads. More recently the company has been expanding into data marketplaces, focusing on vertical industry solutions.

Justin Borgman Co-Founder, CEO

Starburst develops the Starburst Enterprise system— based on the Trino distributed query engine— that provides a way to perform analytics on data no matter where it resides. Its Galaxy cloud software performs cross-cloud query, ETL and business analytics tasks across data warehouses, data lakes and data lakehouses.

Mike Del Balso Co-Founder, CEO

Founded by the team who built Uber’s Michelangelo machine learning system, Tecton is a rising star in the machine learning space. The startup’s enterprise feature store platform enables data teams to build machine learning features using real-time data and quickly put them into production.

The cloud storage industry has over the past few years been focused on developing better ways to tie legacy on-premises storage with storage in hybrid and public multi-cloud infrastructures. And now the emphasis is on protecting cloud-based data. Here are 20 vendors doing just that.—Joseph F. Kovar

Arcserve

Brannon Lacey CEO

Arcserve has been protecting data for decades with its software and hardware appliances and Backup and Disaster Recovery as a Service. The company provides cloud-based data protection that scales and offers multitenant capabilities, defending against cyberattacks with threat prevention, detection and ransomware recovery.

Sanjay Poonen

President, CEO

Cohesity started as a data protection technology developer but has since branched out to focus on the security and management of data, particularly on ways to protect cloudbased and on-premises data against ransomware. The company in 2022 brought in former VMware COO Poonen as president and CEO.

Tianyi “TJ” Jiang Co-Founder, CEO

AvePoint offers SaaS technologies to migrate, manage and protect data in Microsoft 365 and has over 9 million cloud users. AvePoint’s SaaS technologies are also available via MSPs who use it to support and manage their SMB customers. Its multitenant capabilities are available from distributors in over 100 cloud marketplaces.

Commvault

Sanjay Mirchandani

President, CEO

Commvault has evolved from a data protection developer into a cloud-focused data protection and data transformation powerhouse via its software and hardware appliances. It has been increasingly active in protecting data from SaaS applications from companies like Microsoft and SAP with its Metallic Cloud Storage Service.

Axcient

Rod Mathews President, CEO

Axcient provides a suite of business availability technologies specifically for MSPs. They use x360Recover for backup and disaster recovery, x360Cloud for Microsoft application data protection and x360Sync for anti-ransomware protection to help customers protect their data in business and remote work scenarios.

Dave Zabrowski

CEO

DataCore is a pioneer in softwaredefined storage, with capabilities for turning any hardware into block, file and object storage systems. It has been moving quickly to become a leader in container-native storage since its late 2021 acquisition of MayaData and last year introduced enterprise-grade container storage.

Backblaze

Gleb Budman Co-Founder, CEO

Backblaze develops the B2 cloud, which it uses to provide an alternative to AWS for pay-as-you-go storage as a service supporting app development, ransomware protection and data backups. The company also provides automatic unlimited backup for laptops and desktops to businesses and individuals on a subscription basis.

Hammerspace

David

Flynn

Co-Founder,

CEO

Technology from Hammerspace connects global users with their data and applications across their existing data center infrastructures or AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud services. The latest version of its software includes improved scaleout performance to up to 16 clusters, improved metadata performance and an enhanced GUI.

Cloudian

Michael Tso Co-Founder, CEO

Cloudian develops file and object storage technology for S3-compatible object storage systems. Its object-based platform, HyperStore, and its HyperFile object storagebased file system—which combines NAS features with scale-out performance—are available via solution providers and strategic vendor partners.

HYCU

Simon

Taylor Founder, CEO

The HYCU Protégé platform provides extensible multi-cloud data protection and lets businesses move, protect and recover data in complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments with native data protection technology for every data source. It also provides one-click recovery, granular recovery objectives and applicationconsistent backups.

Komprise

Kumar Goswami

Co-Founder, CEO

Komprise develops technology for unstructured data management and mobility. Its Komprise Intelligent Data Management offering lets businesses point the service at any file storage in the cloud or in a data center to get full analytics of the data and migrate it while keeping it in its native format.

Charles Giancarlo Chairman, CEO

Pure Storage is a developer of all-flash storage arrays based on multiple technologies and has paired those arrays with cloud connectivity and the ability to o er storage as a service. This gives customers the agility and flexibility of public cloud storage with the security and performance of on-premises all-flash technology.

MSP360

Brian Helwig CEO

MSP360, formerly known as CloudBerry Lab, provides data protection and IT management technologies for MSPs and IT departments. The company’s MSP360 platform combines data protection for cloud and on-premises data with secure remote access software to support customers or employees along with the company’s own RMM tool.

Mike Potter

Co-Founder, CEO

Rewind helps businesses protect their SaaS and cloud data with the Rewind platform, which provides data backup, restore and copy management. The company’s technology protects data from leading SaaS applications and allows businesses to remain compliant with data security regulations.

Nasuni

Paul Flanagan CEO

Nasuni is a pioneer developer of cloud-native file systems. The company’s UniFS lets businesses scale to any level to unify isolated silos of file storage at hundreds of locations around the world into a single cloud o ering that replaces traditional onpremises primary and secondary file storage.

George Kurian CEO

NetApp is at the forefront in tying onpremises storage to the cloud in a seamless fashion and has in the past few years moved to bring all its technology to the cloud. This allows businesses to manage and migrate data between on-premises and cloud infrastructure in the same way.

Panzura

Jill Stelfox Executive Chairwoman, CEO

Panzura’s CloudFS

Global File System consolidates data from multiple locations into a single authoritative data source that’s deduplicated, compressed and protected against ransomware. It dynamically coordinates where files are stored, what gets sent to the cloud, who has edit and access rights and how data is managed.

Veeam Software

Anand Eswaran CEO

Veeam’s platform protects virtual, physical and cloud-based data with native capabilities for Microsoft, Oracle, SAP HANA and Kubernetes applications as well as from SaaS applications including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams and Salesforce. Data can be backed up and recovered from anywhere to anywhere in a cloud-native fashion.

Veritas Technologies

Greg Hughes CEO

Veritas is a leader in multi-cloud data management, with over 80,000 customers using the company’s technology to protect, recover and ensure compliance of their data. Veritas‘ technology provides data protection and cyber resilience with support for more than 800 data sources, 100 operating systems, 1,400 storage targets and 60 clouds.

David Friend

Co-Founder, President, CEO

Wasabi’s Hot Cloud Storage provides cloud storage technology the company says costs one-fifth the price of competitive cloud storage offering with no egress fees, API call charges or additional hidden fees. Hot Cloud Storage is available direct to solution providers or as the back end to cloud storage from multiple data protection vendors.