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Imanis Data, the enterprise data-management vendor (formerly known as Talena), is looking for a few good channel partners as it transitions its go-to-market strategy from a direct to an indirect sales model.

The vendor, founded in 2013 with the goal of helping large enterprises back up and recover modern data sets, has a small set of customers – about 25 – but is gearing up for growth having recently raised $13.5 million, ($25 million to date), and naming John Mracek as it new CEO.

Imanis Data’s Peter Smalls

“We have a direct go-to-market model today and we’d love to go to an indirect model, but the opportunity for us is to be very strategic,” Peter Smails, chief marketing officer with Imanis Data, told us. “We want to align ourselves with channel partners that understand the Hadoop and NoSQL world.”

Imanis’ enterprise data-management focus is specifically on Hadoop and NoSQL environments, which are primed for growth and represent a strong market opportunity, according to Smails.

“Research shows that 78 percent of organizations are doing something with Hadoop and NoSQL today and 18 percent more are planning to,” he said.

Smails is no stranger to the backup and recovery market for NoSQL databases, having headed up marketing at Datos IO until the company’s recent acquisition by Rubrik, announced earlier this year. Rubrik Datos IO is Imanis Data’s only competitor given that traditional management tools aren’t built for the scale and complexity of NoSQL, Hadoop and the new world of hybrid cloud.

“The market that we’re in is smaller than the traditional on-premises space, but the market is growing about five times faster,” he said.

For the past four years or so, Imanis Data resources were heavily invested in engineering. The pillars of the company’s value focus on protection (backup and recovery); orchestration around data control and data mobility; and automation leveraging machine learning to automate operational processes around data management.

With the latest round of funding, the company is expanding sales and marketing, including building an indirect sales channel, or bringing on board partners familiar with NoSQL and Hadoop.

“This is a new market and it brings with it a new set of technology challenges and it also brings about a new set of personas,” said Smails. “The channel strategy that made you successful in the on-premises world is not the strategy that’s going to make you successful in the hybrid cloud, NoSQL and Hadoop world.”

Why? The primary influencers of these new technologies are not the traditional infrastructure people that resellers are familiar with, such as the storage administrator or the backup administrator.

“The people driving the bus today are DBAs, system architects or cloud architects, developers, the chief data officer — a different clientele,” he said.

With that, the conversation is much more data-centric.

The type of partner that Imanis is looking for is all-in on hybrid-cloud services and new modern applications built on Hadoop and NoSQL in the enterprise space or larger organizations. That means a handful of partners that are aligned with the vendor’s technology vision and market.

Expect to hear more from Imanis Data as it formalizes is partner program this year.