Carbonite’s Whitlock: ‘We Have a 100-Percent Recovery Rate’
Carbonite has grown past its consumer roots through acquisitions: cloud backup service EVault in December 2016, high-availability replication specialist Double-Take Software in January, and endpoint backup and recovery provider Datacastle in August. Together the products protect the data chain from endpoints to servers, physical and virtual, with on-premises and cloud storage options. That new breadth is reflected in a recently revamped website and partner program.
Still, the company faces a tough competitive environment across its target markets — Gartner’s DRaaS Magic Quadrant alone lists 23 major players, from specialists like Acronis and Datto to cloud service providers Expedient and Peak 10 + ViaWest to IBM, Microsoft and NTT. But Jon Whitlock, Carbonite’s VP of channel sales and marketing, says the company’s recent purchases, and the partners that came along for the ride, are helping to push its expanded product line out into new markets.
Carbonite’s Jon Whitlock
“Bringing those three technologies together helps form the basis for that broad portfolio that I don’t think you’re going to get from anyone else,” said Whitlock, who jumped to Carbonite from Kaspersky in July.
The company now has 1.5 million B2C and B2B customers and more than 160 petabytes of data under protection. Its offerings include a service to help migrate customer data among physical, virtual or cloud-based servers, including most flavors of Linux, and AWS, Azure, OpenStack and VMware vCloud or vSphere.
“I think Carbonite’s very unique in being able to provide that level of complete solutions to the marketplace,” said Whitlock. “I’m really excited about that and I tell you, it’s resonating incredibly well with the partner base.”
Channel Partners caught up with Carbonite at SpiceWorld last month, and Whitlock says he’s been doing road shows and events to educate partners on the full product portfolio. Here’s more from our recent conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Channel Partners: After acquisitions, you’re at around 1,000 employees? What percentage of revenue now is from enterprise customers?
Jon Whitlock: A little over one thousand employees, and 70 percent.
CP: Talk a little about your reseller and MSP programs.
JW: As we have grown our presence in the SMB and midmarket, it’s incredibly important for us to develop a program that can accommodate all partners. We wanted to focus on a couple of things as we designed the new program, which we launched just a couple of months ago.
One was ease of use — I have a long history working with the channel on both sides, as a partner – both as a VAR and MSP – and now also on the vendor side. It’s not easy. If you make a program too difficult, I’m probably either not going to participate, or I’m certainly not going to participate at the level you as a vendor want me to. So we really focused on …
