DDN’s data and virtual machine management unit Tintri is ramping up its channel partner effort in Europe to solidify recent sales growth.
Tintri went into Chapter 11 in July 2018 shortly after a disastrous IPO. DDN then bought the company for $60 million and operates it in a DDN Enterprise division along with its acquisitions: Nexenta and the IntelliFlash business previously owned by Western Digital. This is separate from DDN’s traditional HPC and AI-focused At Scale division. No one’s quite sure what Tintri’s global revenues are as part of privately owned DDN, but both have reported a surge in business activity recently, driven by next-generation AI workloads.
At Technology Live! – a data storage and management vendor showcase for press and analysts – Mark Walsh, VP of EMEA sales at Tintri, was pushing the established mantra: “Tintri lets you run multiple workloads across industry-leading hypervisors on one platform,” with Tintri’s VMstore offering playing the central role in this endeavor.
Walsh confirmed that Tintri still only sold through partners, but outlined an ill-defined channel footprint across EMEA. While established partners are very much in place in key markets like the UK and the DACH region, Walsh admitted that “not enough effort” had been made in the past in major markets like France and Italy.
While pre- and post-sales Tintri staff had been on the ground making attempts to drive sales in other important markets like the Nordics, Benelux, and Iberia, Walsh confirmed the partner coverage was spread pretty thin.
“We are now starting an all-new partner strategy,” declared Walsh, “it’s a partner-in-a-box scheme.” He explained the effort was designed to keep things simple for partners, with the aim of quickly bringing on board new ones in the main territories.
A new partner manager will soon be appointed for the DACH region, said Walsh, and “we’ll now make a bigger effort in France”, he added. The company hasn’t got a specific number of partners it wants to onboard, but Walsh confirmed the company was on the look-out for “niche partners” for its specialist products.
Partners will be expected to home in on the company’s key market verticals of the public sector, health, education, and service providers, and address technology needs around virtual servers, SQL, VDI and DevOps.
