Object First cranking up UK channel growth

Object First has seen the channel grow in the UK, but the firm is committed to increasing its base here further as it continues to tap into growing demand for backup and restore tools that can alleviate ransomware attacks.

The vendor launched more than a decade ago in the US, but started to put more muscle into a UK and European channel expansion last year as the firm looked to increase the volume of business it generated outside its home market.

David Bennett, CEO of Object First, said that from the start the firm, which was created by former Veeam founders, had a strong channel ethos and wanted to grow the business via partners.

“We’re 100% channel go to market. We operate on two tier, distributor and then partners, be that resellers or service providers, go to marketplace. A lot of that original launch was about crafting a partner programme, understanding channel margins and [discovering] how you sell the product and how it fits well,” he said.

Bennett said the vendor had built a base of 221 partner in the UK as of today, supporting north of 600 implementations and around 400 end users.

He said that there were more prospects for growth not only due to ongoing customer demand but also due to its market expansion.

“We launched in that mid-market segment [for two reasons]. First, you’re not trying to go after enterprise. Second, you’re not trying to figure out you go out for SME,” he said, adding that the firm had widened its target customer base, with its portfolio recently expanding to allow it to go into smaller SMEs.

“Our product now will scale from 20 terabytes all the way up to seven petabytes. We’re giving more opportunity to open [to] the type of end user they can sell to,” he added.

“Partners are also realising is that, historically, storage has been sold on refresh cycles. But we’re going to people and saying, ‘You fundamentally have a problem with your backup tech stack – you’ve got an on-prem solution that’s not immutable, so if the bad guys get in, they just wipe out your data set. You may have a secondary copy, and that could be tape or on the cloud, but both of those have inherent problems with recovery speed’.”

Bennett said there continued to be a need for partners to educate customers around the consequences of getting attacked and the dangers of being taken offline due to a ransomware attack.

“As soon as you speak to those smaller accounts to say, ‘What happens if you can’t collect any money from any of your customers?’, suddenly they all go, ‘That’s a real problem, because I know I don’t have enough money in the bank to pay my employees or pay my suppliers’,” he said.

“It’s about [working out] how you can survive. What’s really important is: do you have a copy of the data that no one else can modify and delete ... and then how fast can you get that information back?”

Bennett said that there were clear benefits for Veeam partners to add the Object First offering into their portfolios, and the firm would be looking to grow its partner base by appealing to those channel players.

“There’s a huge installed base of Veeam customers here. How do we expand into that user base as fast as possible? The faster we can do that, the faster people are going to be secured in their environment. They can then spend their time on building their business, not worrying about how I recover my business,” he said.