Peer 1 looks for channel growth

IT hosting provider Peer 1 has reached the milestone of gaining 100 partners across EMEA, with 70 of them in the UK, as it looks to secure more business through the channel.

With an ambition to secure 30% of new business via the channel Peer 1 has been recruiting resellers over the past few months looking to gain more exposure to both enterprise and SME markets.

At the same time millions have been ploughed into building a new state of the art datacentre in Porstmouth, which is not far away from its official opening, providing channel partners with the chance to sell hybrid hosting or co-locate in the facility.

Peer 1 has already been courting developers on the South Coast to get them involved with providing applications that can be sld on via the channel to customers.

Amanda Dunn, director of business development at Peer 1, said that it was looking to get more business through the channel and with the take-off with cloud and the desire from customers for greater flexibility there were more opportunities for partners.

She added that it had seen a movement beyond the SME market recently with larger resellers coming on board to use hosting services to target larger enterprise customers.

"We are anticipating 30 per cent of new business to come from the channel by 2012, and have not only been looking to increase the number of our partners across EMEA, but also to improve the quality of our solution providers.," she said.

Peer 1 recently launched the Platinum Plus programme to reward those channel partners that were putting some muscle behind selling the hosted services rewarding partners that registered sales leads with margin for the lifetime of that contract.