Leo Lynch (StorageCraft) and Craig Gledhill (ACA Pacific)
StorageCraft has unveiled plans to expand cloud market share via the channel in Singapore following a strengthened distribution agreement with ACA Pacific.
Building on a partnership stretching back more than 14 years, the renewed alliance centres around ACA Pacific recently gaining sole distribution rights to the vendor’s portfolio of solutions in the city-state, supported by additional reach across Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.
Central to growth efforts will be the deployment of OneXafe Solo 300, a plug-and-play data protection appliance which has recently been approved for sale by the Singapore Government.
According to Leo Lynch - director of sales across Asia Pacific at StorageCraft - the move will help the channel capitalise on increased cloud services demand, delivered primarily via value-added resellers (VARs) and managed service providers (MSPs).
“We have traditionally excelled in the SMB and mid-market,” he said. “While this will be a continued focus, we are also excited about the opportunities to expand our offerings to the enterprise market. We look forward to start offering Singaporean partners and end-users enterprise-class data back-up and recovery at an SMB price point.”
The enhanced focus on Singapore follows the recent merger of StorageCraft and Arcserve, motivated by a desire to create a mega-vendor in the data management and protection market. As reported by Channel Asia, Arcserve CEO Tom Signorello and Douglas Brockett as president of StorageCraft will jointly lead the combined entity.
From a customer vantage point, the deal is designed to be complementary with Arcserve mostly catering to the enterprise, supported by StorageCraft predominantly serving the SMB space.
In the addition, the transaction will also simplify the selling process with solutions, services and support from the one, unified vendor while also “providing diversification to help partners expand addressable market share, scale revenue, and create margin opportunities”.
“As organisations increasingly look to cloud services to help manage their data environments' cost and complexity, a successful partner will harness these opportunities by leveraging the full suite of solutions from a single vendor who can offer aggressive and competitive margins,” Lynch added.
Building on a local channel partnership stretching back 14 years, Lynch cited the decision to appoint ACA Pacific as sole distributor in Singapore as “essential” to future success.
“We have a great degree of trust in ACA Pacific's expertise and depth of knowledge that has been built and demonstrated over time,” he stated. “This local knowledge, coupled with strong, strategic relationships with partners, provides us with a distinct competitive advantage to set us up for further growth.
“As this part of the region begins its journey to recovery, we intend to work closely with ACA Pacific in the next 12 months to secure more strategic partnerships. We will build upon the existing traditional business of StorageCraft with cloud back-up, disaster recovery-as-a-service [DRaaS] and look at moving into the high-end mid-market and enterprise space.”
In response, ACA Pacific has also invested additional resources - spanning both sales and technical roles - to further drive data protection growth via the channel, leveraging cloud back-up solutions to primarily target SME customers.
“Our renewed partnership with StorageCraft will continue to expand channel presence across all regions and provide resellers with a one-stop shop for the full range of solutions,” added Craig Gledhill, CEO of ACA Pacific. “We have the expertise and the strategies to carve a path of success with StorageCraft, supported by providing extensive sales and channel coverage to expand the market.”
As the sole distributor of StorageCraft, Gledhill said partner and customers can expect “optimal support” following increased investment in technical and marketing resources, with a focus on demand generation activities.
“We want to work with partners that have a strong focus on SMEs and are offering customers cloud back-up solutions,” he said. “The Singapore market is doing well considering, which is thanks mainly to the great government support businesses have received during these trying times.
“The outlook we are seeing is that certain market segments are still tentative to invest in new technology as they are waiting for the country to open back up. The great opportunity we are seeing for the portfolio of StorageCraft in general is it offers solutions for the critical business needs during and post pandemic environment.”
