Founded in 1986, Asigra is the specialist in distributed data backup and recovery solutions for network computing. With Asigra's Televaulting software, enterprises can reliably protect mission-critical information across all their geographically dispersed "data islands," whether they reside on servers, desktops or laptops. Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra Inc., describes what’s on offer for the channel.

Asigra’s route to market is via a traditional two-tier model. Asigra has local distributors in various areas around the world, including the UK and Ireland. Asigra’s distributors are tasked with recruiting, managing, training and supporting their own community of reseller partners and service providers. The reseller partners sell to end-user customers, typically SMEs and enterprise customers with geographically dispersed multi-site environments. In the UK and Ireland, resellers can contact Accentuate on 07768-340-498 [www.accentuate-international.com]. In this way, everyone does what they do best. Asigra makes the software, distributors make it available to the channel, and resellers stay focused on customers.

Q: Why do you think partners and customers choose Asigra? And, why should new partners choose to work with Asigra?

A: Reseller partners choose Asigra for two main reasons. Firstly, Asigra helps the reseller solve customers’ backup/restore problems when they involve multi-site distributed environments. So we enable the reseller to bring thought-leadership to the customer’s table. Secondly, resellers choose Asigra because they make money. If a reseller has recently lost a sale to Asigra, then perhaps we can partner up on the next opportunity. Resellers also seem to favour the added-value opportunities we provide, such as consulting services and third party products like secondary back-up.

Customers choose Asigra for three main reasons. Firstly, Asigra provides business benefits as a cost-containment project to lower the operational costs associated with backup and restoration of data. If customers are looking inside their organisation where to reduce IT costs, backup and restore is well understood and should be an obvious place to examine. After all, a penny saved is a penny earned. Secondly, Asigra’s agentless architecture is very appealing as it reduces the hidden costs and administration that comes with agents, such as in the renewal of licenses. Thirdly, Asigra dramatically improves internal service-level agreements (SLAs) to end-users associated with backup/restore. The time it takes to restore files drops by several magnitudes.

Q: How do you support your channel?

A: We train their staff and provide a support service to them including joint-selling support as required.

Q: What benefits and incentives do you offer to your existing partners/new partners?

A: We provide leads to the channel obtained through our PR, advertising and trade show program, supply reasonable quantities of demonstration product and promotional materials, run a lead registration program and offer tiered discounts.

Q: At what times of the year do you recruit new partners?

A: After the summer is always a good time to do business and this fits in well with the upcoming trade show season, which usually produces new leads.

Q: Do you want new partners now?

A: We are always pleased to discuss opportunities, so yes, we are looking for new partners now. We particularly want to recruit partners with added-value, geographic or vertical market specialisations.