Press Releases
06-11-07 11:45
DATA SOLUTIONS ?JUMP STARTS? XENSERVER
By Che Golden
Data Solutions is putting EUR 1.25 million into supporting ten partners on its new ?Jump Start? partner program. Jump Start is designed to develop the Citrix XenServer virtualisation reseller program in Ireland. Michael O?Hara, MD of Data Solutions, is confident the company will see a good return on its investment.
The program gives access to a range of technical, sales and marketing resources with a value of EUR125, 000 to each reseller. MJ Flood Technology is the first Data Solutions partner to sign-up and another nine are expected over the course of the next year ? O?Hara is confident the company will be announcing another partner signing next week.
?Jump Start is about removing barriers and giving our partners a leg-up,? said O?Hara. ?The introduction of new technologies such as virtualisation is an expensive and challenging undertaking for the reseller community. As more complex technologies are being developed, presenting the business case for them to customers takes a significant amount of time and resources. By leveraging Data Solutions? experience in bringing new technologies to market, creating sales leads and expertise in developing channel marketing initiatives, Jump Start removes many of the previous restrictions that resellers faced trying to sell virtualisation to their customers.?
Data Solutions has been a distributor of XenSource for over a year and O?Hara claims the market has changed dramatically in those 12 months. ?XenSource used to be a hard sell, people used to see it as paper cup software,? he said. ?But since Citrix bought the company out we have seen a huge surge of interest and people are now coming to us to talk about it, rather than us going out to them.?
While the Citrix acquisition has given XenSoure more muscle, there have been criticisms that the product is not as well developed as that offered by its largest competitor, VMWare. VMWare is a formidable competitor in the Irish market with the might of EMC behind it and the cash it has generated internationally as a result of its IPO. While acknowledging the criticisms, O?Hara claims that XenSource?s strategy of using best of breed partnerships to enhance its technology means it will soon match, and perhaps even overtake, VMWare?s functionality.
?Later this month XenSource will make an OEM announcement with Symantec for its Veritas product, which has been around for 20 years,? said O?Hara. ?Veritas has been tried and tested and is well supported in the Irish marketplace by established companies, whereas VMWare goes down the route of developing its own code for add on functionality. That makes it an unknown quantity for customers, even if it is badged by VMWare. While Xen has 90 per cent of the functionality of the VMWare product at the moment, new releases and further OEM announcements means it will soon out strip it.?
Data Solutions is convinced that the virtualisation market is reaching a tipping point. ?Nine out of 10 customers we speak to are looking at it, while one will actually be doing it,? said O?Hara. ?The market is beginning to move. IDC recently predicted that Citrix would be hitting revenues of USD 5 billion by 2011 thanks to server and desk top virtualisation, which is a massive jump when you consider Citrix turned over USD 1.1 billion in 2006. That is the kind of potential we see for ourselves.
?Through the Jump Start program, Data Solutions? partners will be provided with technical support to the value of EUR 50,000. Included in this is certified technical training for engineers; installation of demonstration products; technical presentations and demos at customer events; on-site technical assistance; and pre-sales assistance at customer meetings. In addition to this technical support, the Jump Start program offers partners EUR75,000 in sales and marketing resources to help them ?close the deal? with their customers. It includes; sales training workshops; lead generation and data base building; quote preparation; direct marketing campaigns; seminars and workshops; telemarketing support and PR activities.