Velostrata Launches Formal Channel Program To Drive Partner Enablement

Velostrata, a startup that's creating new pathways to cloud adoption by decoupling storage from other computing resources, Wednesday formally launched its first channel program.

The program looks to formalize relationships with a base of more than 30 partners who are using the startup's tools to deliver cloud resources to customers looking to keep their data on-premise, Jan Poczobutt, vice president of sales and partnerships at Velostrata, told CRN.

"In the market, there's one bottleneck everything is converging around -- how to get workloads from on-prem to cloud. Once you can do that a lot of great things happen," Poczobutt said.

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Velostrata has taken a unique approach to solving that problem, he said, one that enables customers to leverage public cloud in minutes.

"Everyone else tries to bring all the data over. We bring compute over," Poczobutt said.

Velostrata's WAN optimization technology streams data to Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure for processing, without requiring it ever to reside in cloud storage.

That changes the game for cloud migrations.

"We can accelerate that process by an order of magnitude. It's a brand-new way of looking at migration and speeding it up," Poczobutt said.

That's particularly valuable to partners because they start earning money selling added services once their customers are consuming cloud, he said.

At the start of 2016, the company, founded in Israel, named John Donnelly, a former executive at MobileIron and Symantec, as its first channel chief. Poczobutt, who previously led sales at Barracuda Networks, replaced Donnelly in April.

Velostrata's program is focusing on partner enablement and certification, Poczobutt said, helping partners add its tools into their business models and practices.

Partners can either be strictly services partners, or have a resale relationship with discounts depending on levels of deal registration, he said.

Jose Hernandez, managing partner at MyCloudDoor, a Microsoft Azure partner based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., told CRN that Velostrata's software helps his company assure clients their cloud migrations are as safe, free of risk, and easy as possible.

"Two years ago, when I first saw what Velostrata solutions could do, I first thought it was some kind of magic," he said. "It was the perfect match for our service portfolio."

Velostrata addresses some of the most common technical concerns of customers, he said, including having a safety net to reverse a migration.

"The partnership with Velostrata has given us a clear competitive edge when dealing with cloud transition projects," Hernandez told CRN.