Data discovery and management vendor Aparavi has updated its partner program.
Among other changes, the revamped offering includes a first-ever partner portal stocked with training and marketing materials and new consumption options for managed and cloud service providers.
“You’ve got a lot of VARs that are trying to become managed service providers that want to consume licensing in a much more flexible type of model,” says Amanda Regnerus, Aparavi’s vice president of Americas marketing. “We’re trying to make sure that partners aren’t pigeonholed into one strategy.”
New as well in the Aparavi Advantage Partner Program, as it’s officially known, is a Quick Start Assessment Program that partners can use to locate unstructured data across end user environments and then classify it before pitching add-on services aimed at eliminating unneeded files and safeguarding sensitive ones.
“It’s a very low cost, low barrier of entry way for our partners to understand how they can go to market with Aparavi,” Regnerus says.
The new program includes Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond tiers, all of which offer discounted pricing on Aparavi software. “Like any other program, you receive greater discounts the more that you sell,” Regnerus notes.
In addition, the Silver level, which is open to everyone, includes access to the portal and assessment program, not-for-resale licensing good for 12 months, and limited access to market development funds.
Partners who contribute $50,000 per calendar year to Aparavi’s top line can qualify for additional MDF and dedicated account resources by becoming Gold partners. Generating $100,000 of revenue annually for Aparavi qualifies partners for Platinum membership, while $1 million a year confers eligibility for the Diamond level. Platinum and Diamond partners can also potentially join the vendor’s partner advisory council.
Founded in 2017, Aparavi (the name is loosely derived from the Latin verb “to prepare”) makes multitenant software for finding and categorizing unstructured data both on premises and in the cloud, on any storage platform. Channel pros can use the system, which is sold exclusively through partners, to help customers save money by eliminating what it calls “ROT data,” the redundant, obsolete, and trivial files most businesses have large amounts of but no use for.
“Why pay for things that you don’t need?” Regnerus asks. “The less data you have, the less you have to backup, the less you have to pay for, the less you have to store and archive to a third-party vendor somewhere.”
That in turn makes more money available for higher-value services, Regnerus continues. “It frees up IT budget and spend for those service providers to add more services to get deeper and wider and stickier with their customer.”
Eliminating ROT data also accelerates and lowers the cost of cloud migrations, Aparavi emphasizes. The vendor also helps end users find and secure files containing proprietary information and data covered by regulations like HIPAA and PCI-DSS.
Employing a library of over 140 built-in policies as well as custom-created ones, users can automatically copy and delete data based on a customer’s data retention standards, or archive it to an onsite repository, Amazon’s S3 cloud service, or any S3-compliant alternative.
According to Aparavi, defining and enforcing retention standards arms channel pros to earn incremental revenue providing data lifecycle management services. Partners can also use the system to perform annual data health checks.
Evangelizing opportunities like that is Aparavi’s top priority for the remainder of this year. “The focus for us is trying to get partners to understand the value of unlocking unstructured data,” Regnerus says. “It’s almost like it seems so simple that they miss it.”
