'7 Minutes' with JetStream Software Co-Founder, President Rich Petersen

JetStream Software, a cloud software development vendor, is targeting Zerto, Veeam and other competitors with its new software solution for enabling cloud service providers (CSPs) and MSPs to deliver cloud-based services to enterprise customers.

JetStream DR offers: continuous data protection, with immediate data replication to a recovery service; business continuity, with virtual machine (VM) failover to a “warm cloud” environment; and disaster recovery (DR), with VM and data recovery from cloud object stores.

JetStream complements VMware cloud infrastructures including VMware Cloud Provider Partners (VCPPs) and VMware Cloud on AWS.

New partnerships with object storage vendors including Cloudian and MinIO join the company’s growing partner network with VMware, Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft.

In a Q&A with Channel Partners, Rich Petersen, JetStream’s co-founder and president, talks about what differentiates his company from competitors and what it has to offer the channel.

Channel Partners: Tell us what customers love about your product or service. What’s the secret selling sauce?

JetStream Software’s Rich Petersen

Rich Petersen: Customers are increasingly looking to cloud and managed service providers for disaster recovery and business continuity services. That’s a huge trend, with billions of dollars shifting from on-premises storage backup appliances to cloud-based failover and DR services. But the software that’s available today for those service providers was originally designed for on-premises operations, and provides snapshot-based backups, rather than continuous data replication and remote recovery. So, when we introduce JetStream DR to service providers, their response is along the lines of, “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for!”

CP: Describe your channel program — metal levels, heavy on certifications, open or selective, unique features?

RP: We work with two types of channel partners. The first group is more traditional channel partners, who manage relationships with large end customers. That kind of channel partner typically serves an enterprise private cloud operation that requires virtual machine mobility across data centers and workload protection across multiple data centers. The second group is more of a hybrid, in that they also act as a CSP or MSP to their end customers. So, they deliver the capabilities of our software to the end customer from their own infrastructure or from a third party’s infrastructure — even a hyperscale cloud like AWS, Azure or Google. We are open to both types of partners, but our go-to-market effort is very strongly oriented toward the CSP/MSP channel partners. There are a lot of them; many have decades-long relationships with their end customers, and they see a lot of their core value as a guide to the best solutions for their customers’ needs. I think that’s the key reason we’ve seen such a positive response from them.

CP: Quick-hit answers: Percentage of sales through the channel, number of partners, average margin. Go.

RP: 70% MSP/CSP; 20% traditional channel; 10% direct.

CP: Do you work with any master agents or distributors now? Is so, which ones, and if not, do you expect to establish these relationships?

RP: We have distributors, but mostly for customers outside North America, where there is some additional value to having a local partner.

CP: Who are your main competitors, and what makes your offering better?

RP: Among VMware-oriented data protection software vendors that partner with MSPs and CSPs, the most active are Zerto and Veeam. Our offering is differentiated in three key respects: JetStream DR captures data for replication continuously through VMware IO filters, for near-zero recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO); replication logging, data transport and VM failover are optimized for the cloud (i.e. data center-to-data center connections); and JetStream DR can …

… replicate full VMs and all their data to any S3-compatible object store, with full in-cloud rehydration to a VMware cluster, for “on-demand DR.”

CP: How do you think your technology portfolio will change in the next three years?

RP: Our continuous data protection (CDP) and point-in-time recovery capabilities will get more advanced. Our monitoring and management of compute, storage and network resources will incorporate AI and machine learning to proactively adapt to changing workloads, activity and requirements. And we will see cross-platform protection in addition to VMware-to-VMware DR.

CP: How do you expect your channel strategy to evolve over that time frame?

RP: The MSP and CSP partners will remain a focus for our channel strategy, but we will also see growth in the service provider/consultant channel. They used to be called systems integrators, but that name is a little anachronistic as they focus on being the sherpas in their customers’ cloud journeys.

CP: What didn’t we ask that partners should know?

RP: The shift from on-premises data protection to cloud services for business continuity is a huge disruption in our industry, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the entire market will be carved up by three or four hyperscale cloud providers, and everybody else will die off. There will be opportunity, but to paraphrase Thomas Edison, it’s incumbent on us to not miss the opportunity just because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.