Coraid Launches EMEA Channel Program

Coraid Inc. announced its EMEA channel
programme, designed to leverage local resellers’ expertise to help
manage and further accelerate Coraid’s growth.

The EMEA region is open to the evaluation and adoption of
innovative technologies and this helped Coraid grow local sales in Q1
2011 by nearly 3x over the previous year. In order to manage this growth
Coraid decided to adopt a channel strategy to tap into the
technical and regional expertise resellers can offer in addition to
integration and support services. The current partners are all
specialists in the markets they serve, providing Coraid access to new
industry segments.

"Coraid offers the most user-friendly storage system we have come
across and its performance capabilities are unmatched, especially at
this price point," said Roger Burgess, Director at gold partner Admiral
IT. "For us to be able to offer a high-performance solution that is easy
to integrate, run and support means that we can target a wider market
with a relatively low resource investment."

Today EMEA Gold Partners for Coraid include:

Belgium: S3
Germany: Basis GmbH
France: Alyseo
Netherlands: Proact
Spain: Ulteria
Sweden: Proact
UK: Admiral IT, Axis First, Bell Microsystems, Coal IT, Millennia Computer Services, Nexstor, Solid State Disks and S3.

With senior executives coming from companies including Cisco, NetApp and VMware,
the Coraid team understands how to build a successful channel program.
Marcos Burnett, EMEA Sales Director, at Coraid, comments: "We have taken
the most successful aspects of many channel programmes we have worked
with in the past and incorporated them into ours; this has resulted in a
massive increase in members and triple-digit growth in partner-sourced
revenue."

Under the channel programme Coraid’s resellers can access the partner
portal to source presentations, whitepapers, analyst reports, and focussed sales tools. In addition they can request
financial support for joint events and tradeshows.

Burnett continues: "To attract top resellers today a vendor must offer
strong margins, responsiveness, and the ability to bring something
unique to the table. To achieve this we work closely with our channel to
help them design and sell entire solutions and the feedback has been
very positive because this approach is becoming less and less common
among storage vendors."

Resellers have already sold Coraid’s solutions in over 350 European organisations in the financial services, education, research, internet, and media industries.