'7 Minutes' With Charles Bass, VP of Channels, Blue Medora

‘7 Minutes’ With Charles Bass, VP of Channels, Blue Medora

Written by Lorna Garey
July 3, 2017

The company has supplemented its VAD and VAR strategy with hooks into VMware's massive partner base.

**Editor’s Note: “7 Minutes” is a feature where we ask channel executives from startups – or companies that may be new to the Channel Partners audience – a series of quick questions about their businesses and channel programs.**

Startup Blue Medora, part of a modest tech boom underway in Michigan, provides IT operational analytics (ITOA) and monitoring — think of it as the next iteration of APM. The company’s plug-ins gather data from a variety of platforms, hardware, databases and applications from technology partners including AWS, Cisco, Dell EMC, F5, HPE, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nutanix, VMware and more. Analysis of that data provides an early warning of pending performance problems.

Blue Medora’s Charles Bass

While VP of Channels Charles Bass wouldn’t disclose margins, Blue Medora earned $10 million in 2016 and is reportedly on pace to double that in 2017, with what company CEO Nathan Owen calls record growth driven by companies moving to cloud and depending on analytics to increase application uptime and help DevOps teams cut time to market. Partners in the VMware ecosystem are likely familiar with the Blue Medora True Visibility Suite, recently available as part of the VMware vCloud Air Network Program.

Before joining Blue Medora, Bass was VP of channel sales at flash-storage provider Tegile. As to the name, IBM was an early partner – homage to Big Blue – while Medora is a glacial lake in Michigan.

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

Charles Bass: Organizations demand a clear view of the performance and status of every device, solution and application in their IT stack, regardless of where they reside or how that changes. Customers turn to Blue Medora for a comprehensive view across its entire IT infrastructure to both provide better insights of its applications and improve its overall application performance. Our secret sauce is our centralized IT operations platform that helps improve storage management, monitoring and troubleshooting for customers. With the Blue Medora True Visibility Suite, the IT operations team achieves end-to-end visibility, analytics and capacity planning for workloads running on various platforms.

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

CB: Blue Medora launched the global True Visibility Partner Program to help resellers significantly grow their VMware vSphere and vRealize Operations business. In addition, the new program helps partners expand their market reach in virtualized and hybrid cloud environments, with Blue Medora focusing on extending vRealize Operations’ cloud management capabilities to include providing a single pane of glass for all performance and application information.

In addition, Blue Medora maintains an emphasis on …