Arcserve Anoints Ingram Micro Exclusive Distributor for North America
Except for the occasional startup company that has no IT infrastructure, the selling of backup and recovery software is a fiercely competitive business that requires one vendor to replace another to make any headway at all.
Against that backdrop Arcserve announced it has named Ingram Micro to be its exclusive distributor for North America. Having spun off from CA Technologies last year, Arcserve has been re-establishing a brand in the channel that essentially got lost in the direct sales force model that CA Technologies mainly employs.
While the Ingram Micro relationship will supersede previous relationships Arcserve had with other distributors in North America, Arcserve CEO Mike Crest said the company will continue to work with other distributors around the globe.
Despite the fact that most organizations already have backup and recovery software, the overall market is still growing 9 percent yearly on a base of about $6 billion, Crest noted. Much of that growth is being driven by the simple fact that the amount of data that needs to be managed appears to be doubling every 18 months.
After spinning off from CA Technologies, Arcserve’s first big move was to unveil a backup and recovery appliance. Previously, Arcserve only offered backup and recovery software that runs on a server, which meant the company wasn’t addressing a substantial portion of the market—one that prefers to employ an appliance to run backup and recovery software rather than taxing CPU cycles on a server to perform that function. Crest said the next big target on Arcserve’s list is to recruit managed service and cloud service providers that are delivering backup and recovery services.
In the meantime, Scott Zahl, vice president of Advanced Solutions at Ingram Micro, said the distributor will use its business intelligence capabilities to identify potential customers that have not recently upgraded their backup and recovery software to create leads for its channel partners.
Arcserve also is counting on the consolidation of backup and recovery processes. Over the years many organizations bought dedicated backup and recovery software for virtual machines. Now that virtual machines are so prevalent, many of them are looking to consolidate the backup and recovery processes surrounding both their virtual and physical servers.
Of course, just about every vendor in the backup and recovery space is running the same basic game plan. As a market segment, backup and recovery software has proven to be especially resistant to vendor consolidation. The end result is a plethora of competition that often winds up putting a lot of pressure on profitability in this category.
On the plus side, however, usage of backup and recovery software isn’t likely to slacken anytime soon, which makes this entire category a space the channel can count on to generate revenue for years to come.
