TORONTO – With a new study out from IDC Canada that shows 40 per cent of Canadian businesses do not reopen after a disaster, the market for business continuity services is getting hot.
At the same time, Zerto, a Boston-based disaster recovery software vendor has entered the Canadian market. Zerto intends to arrive in Canada with not just its own approach to business continuity services but possibly a new solution that can stop ransomware.
Zerto’s approach to disaster recovery is to be non-hardware based and hypervisor agnostic. They are also app agnostic. “We are not wed to one vendor and customers have a choice to go with an all-flash solution in the data centre or move to disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS),” said Rob Strechay, vice president of products for Zerto.
The IDC Canada study also found more than 80 per cent of those companies with a disaster recovery plan in place are not testing it.
Besides its DRaaS push, Zerto is also putting a bulls-eye on ransomware. Strechay told CDN that Zerto solutions are able to fall back a few minutes from when the ransomware attack hits. This enables the customer to encrypt files that were being targeted instead of paying the ransom. In most cases Zerto can go back two to five minutes before the attack and clean off the ransomware. According to Strechay, the ransomware code usually sits inside of a customer environment for six months undetected waiting for some action to trigger the attack.
“We protect the infrastructure and go up to the cloud. When you look at us; we are agnostic and it aids in the digital transformation happening today or IoT because the focus is on that underlining movement of data in the workflow. So as you do IoT that data is more important and it’s the life blood of a company,” he said.
New channel program
Zerto has a 100 per cent channel friendly go-to market model. The company recently enhanced its channel program called the Zerto Alliance Partner program or ZAP to feature new rewards along with new training offers.
Zerto has been able to grow its channel base by more than 50 per cent and currently sports 1,500 solution providers in its network.
Strechay told CDN the Canadian market is being used to grow the company’s base of channel partners. Zerto has approximately 300 managed service providers worldwide and the plan is to grow that base by venturing into markets such as Canada. “We want to help MSPs by giving them a platform for DRaaS with monthly billing features that is measured to keep CapEx low,” he said.
ZAP, for example, gives channel partners options on which business models they can work under with Zerto. This can pinpoint the right training and incentives for solution providers. Zerto is making a concerted effort to reward partners for their value proposition instead of volume selling.
Partner rewards are not solely focus on sales but also training, certifications, and marketing.
Zerto allows channel partners to price its solutions anyway it wants. Strechay said he has seen some partners mark it up 100 per cent but the average is around 30 points.
“Canada has untapped potential with several cross border companies. There is a lot of cross pollination and our services can help the solution providers and they do not need to build a data centre to do it,” he said.
The ZAP program has three tiers Platinum, Gold and Silver. “We are looking for partners who want to grow with us and no longer want to sell point products,” Strechay added.
ZAP also enables solution providers along with cloud service providers and alliance partners to access marketing resources for promoting DRaaS through its ZAP portal site. Training is a no cost option for channel partners under the ZAP program.
