Michael McClurg VP Global Business Partners, Actifio

Actifio, Inc. appointed Michael McClurg as VP of global business partners.

 McClurg is a 25-year veteran in building channels. Before joining Actifio, he was the VP sales for IBM’s global midmarket and MSP sales team, where he was responsible for leading IBM’s company-wide focus on expanding sales and working with MSPs to deliver innovation and capabilities. He helped establish the business partner organization at IBM XIV storage systems and was instrumental to increasing revenues over 400% annually and winning a CRN 5 Star Award. Prior to IBM, he he held senior positions in EMC‘s US and Latin American Sales, Sun Microsystems, Sequent Computer Systems and Prime Computer.

In addition, the company launched two new channel partners programs intended to better enable partner sales and services opportunities.

Partner Professional Services Program
It will enable partner organizations to become authorized providers of Actifio value added services, including its Quickstart service, SOW-based service deployment option, and OnSite residency. The program will be supported through online training available through the online Actifio University, the company’s global knowledge management platform, and a formal mentorship program with the Actifio services team.

Special Forces Program
It will focus on identifying individual representative and solution architecture teams within partner organizations and provide them access to the same training, tools, knowledge management platforms, and co-marketing funds available to Actifio’s internal reps. The program was launched at an event in Barcelona, Spain where more than 41 partners from across 14 countries were in attendance.

Actifio’s channel partners recognize that the Copy storage market represents one of the largest business opportunity in enterprise IT market. IDC recently sized this market at $44 billion in 2013, and is expected to grow to more than $50 billion by 2016. Actifio’s partner program continues to thrive through a committed focus on innovation and quality service. A recent TechValidate survey showed that 64% of Actifio partners have solved their clients’ data protection challenges using the Copy storage Platform and 80% describe Actifio support as excellent or better.

"Actifio allows us to get into competitive accounts where we normally wouldn’t have an opportunity to do so," said Dan Dougherty, consultant, Champion Solutions Group.

Steve Adil, manager, Mainline Information Systems, continues that "[Actifio] is a disruptive technology. It is going to change the way people manage data a great deal in the next few years. It’s exciting to be a part of that."

Channel partners already embrace Actifio as the solution to evolving their business through innovative offerings such as a utility pay-as-you-grow pricing, ability to deliver on-premise solutions and extend to the cloud through MSP’s.

"The development of our relationship with our valued channel partners is critically important to our success around the world," said Jim Sullivan, Actifio president. "We truly value their support, and want to make sure we’re doing all we can to make working with Actifio both a pleasure and a steadily more lucrative proposition."

"It is very exciting to join Actifio amid the success the company is experiencing enabling partners to help companies tackle the copy storage problem," said McClurg. "Through my own experience, I have found that channel success is built on mutual commitment and focus. Actifio has built its channel with much of the same approach in mind. By providing knowledgeable expertise and establishing quality relationships, I am confident that Actifio will continue achieving international success and expanding globally."

Amidst the channel growth, Gartner Inc. has positioned Actifio in the 2013 Magic Quadrant: Enterprise Backup/Recovery Software report in the Visionarie" quadrant, making Actifio the youngest and fastest vendor to make the Magic Quadrant. Of the hundreds of vendors, only the top fifteen were featured in the report.