Hosted storage vendor Nine Technology has announced a partnership with channel reseller association NASBA to offer “Powered by Nine” online backup and recovery solutions to their membership. For Nine Technology, the partnership enhances and reinforces their play for the channel. For NASBA, it’s an opportunity for their membership to potentially see the kind of recurring revenue the cloud can bring. I spoke to both parties about the announcement.

The three-year-old Nine Technology provides white-label, reseller-brandable storage solutions for endpoints, in the form of ONE, and for enterprise servers, by way of the not-yet-released PRO. Nine Technology says the two will seamlessly integrate with each other.

Nine Technology Senior VP Gene Fay says that their real differentiation for SMBs and the resellers that service them is in the fact that their storage grid isn’t on a SAN or a NAS, but rather a RAIN-based architecture. Fay says that means “Powered by Nine” solutions provide hugely improved transfer speeds over competitor Mozy, and better security to boot.

NASBA Executive Director Frank Raimondi had nothing but praise for Nine Technology and the potential margins online storage represents for the association’s system integrator and reseller members, calling ONE and PRO “complete solutions” with a strong value proposition for the channel.

“It’s one of the easiest ways to make sustainable money,” Raimondi says.

A growing number of software companies are partnering with associations and peer groups to promote SaaS offerings to VARs and integrators. For more examples, check in with ASCII Group, HTG Members and SMB Technology Network.

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