Storage vendor X-IO Technologies has made the transition from a direct and indirect sales mix to a pure channel play strategy, the company announced this month. Beginning immediately, X-IO will sell its solutions exclusively through its worldwide channel partners in North America, EMEA and APAC, according to an announcement.

X-IO’s 100 percent channel-centric focus launched in conjunction with the company’s new eXcellence Partner Program, which offers resellers the chance to differentiate their portfolios and protect deals through a series of unorthodox channel offerings.

While most vendors and solution providers have both a direct and indirect channel sales play, some companies decide to forgo direct sales to show their reliance on reseller partners. X-IO Vice President of North America Mark Zeller said the company’s decision to go pure channel came from partner demand for more reseller-focused efforts and for a simpler and more rewarding partner program structure.

“One thing we’re very proud of is that we listen carefully to both our customers and the market’s demands and we heard that people love our storage products but that customers want solutions to business challenges, not just raw storage products and that’s where the channel come in,” said Zeller, in an email with The VAR Guy. “We want to attract and keep genuine value-added, solution-oriented resellers.”

The first thing partners will notice about the eXcellence Partner Program is its lack of reseller tiers. Unlike most other hierarchal reseller programs, X-IO decided to institute a single level, which differentiates partners as either exclusive or non-exclusive X-IO resellers.

The next big difference in X-IO’s partner program is an emphasis on “opportunity exclusivity” over traditional deal registration. Unlike most deal registration offerings, X-IO resellers are able to register exclusivity with a prospect before a deal is started, so they can fully protect their opportunity from competitors.

Finally, X-IO has instituted a “Correct Cost Club” to provide partners with street value pricing and margin protection on their sales. The company said the modularity of its ISE storage architecture will also help partners to benefit from recurring revenue options and capabilities, which serve as the more traditional benefits of X-IO’s program.

“The channel is the growth engine for X-IO and the eXcellence Partner Program drives partner success by offering vastly-superior profitability through true sales enablement without any ‘fine print’,” said Diamond Lauffin, chief of channel strategy for X-IO, in a statement. “We’ve differentiated every component of our program to make it easy for partners to quickly grow their businesses with storage solutions that offer significant technology advantages.”