Panzura Freedom Lifts Company’s Partner Program Prospects

… it gives the freedom to move from [one] platform … to another,” Stelfox said. “The user doesn’t have to know where it’s stored.”

Rather, employees access Panzura Freedom while, in the background, the IT team (or its channel partner) decides into which cloud the traffic should go. Since most organizations use more than one cloud, a secondary benefit arises from this approach, Stelfox said: Panzura lets the IT team place the file into the least-expensive cloud, helping to save money. While this is not the primary reason for using Panzura, it adds rationale for controlling cloud expenses as organizations pay more attention to costs than ever.

“The sudden acceleration in the trajectory of enterprise remote working trajectory, from ‘nice to have’ to ‘essential,’ is driving global IT investments in real-time collaboration with virtual teams, business continuity and data security,” said Rich Weber, president of Panzura.

Due to the acquisition, Weber, formerly chief product officer, now serves as president of Panzura. The company promoted Jason Luehrs to CFO. Chereskin brought on serial entrepreneur Stelfox as CEO and executive chairman (some partners may remember her from Zebra Technologies). Patrick Harr and Steve Morgan, who led Panzura, left to pursue “their next cloud ventures,” Panzura said.

Panzura Talks Channel Strategy

Panzura already teams with several MSPs and resellers. Yet as it works to expand market share, it wants to add more partners to sell Freedom cloud storage. To enable that, Panzura plans to make Freedom easier to implement, and to improve its training and certification, among other initiatives.

“That is all the No. 1 goal of Panzura today,” Stelfox said.

Why? Organizations outside the Fortune 1000s are committing to hybrid cloud strategies. And as SMBs, midmarket firms, nonprofits and others turn not only to private, public and multiple clouds, they depend on integrators, VARs and managed service providers to handle their environments.

“That’s where the channel is great,” Stelfox said. “They know the buyers, the end users and support them already.”

Panzura only started its channel program about two years ago. Yet is the largest area of growth within the company, Stelfox said.

To support the demand, Panzura continues to develop its initiatives. For starters, it now offers version 8 of the Freedom platform.

“So the good news is the burden on the channel partner to get up to speed is well-documented and well-traversed,” Stelfox said. “It’s actually not that tough in terms of implementation. We’ve had partners sign up and not just close an end-user deal but implement it within three months. It’s pretty quick.”

Overall, partners will speed up their own processes by understanding cloud and cloud infrastructure. But they don’t even have to be that knowledgeable.

“We can work around it,” Stelfox said.

To wit, Panzura employs an always-on customer service team throughout the world.

“All of this can be done remotely; no one is required to be onsite,” Stelfox. “It’s all over phone and the cloud.”

Certainly that marks a big plus in a pandemic when officials discourage people from being in close quarters with one another.

In addition, Panzura provides a full training and certification suite, depending on partner level and commitment.

“Then we also offer marketing funds, all the normal full channel program kinds of things, all based on the level of sales,” Stelfox said

And while Panzura has an inside sales team, those staff do not compete with …