By Todd R. Weiss

As Zerto, the disaster recovery and data backup vendor, preps the soon-to-be released update of its IT Resilience platform, the company has created a new program to provide money to channel partners who boost their sales of the company’s products as part of Microsoft Azure deployments.

Zerto’s Peter Kerr

The program is aimed at Zerto partners who are also Microsoft Certified resellers that sell Azure, Peter Kerr, the vice president of global alliances, told Channel Partners.

“The big thing this year is that Zerto is a top-five independent software vendor (ISV) with Microsoft,” based on sales and product consumption, he said. “Zerto supports Azure and sells a lot of software for Azure.”

To grow those sales even more, Zerto is now taking applications from Zerto partners – who are also Microsoft partners – for payments of $1,500-$15,000 to help them create proofs of concept and customer strategies that can help ring up new sales, said Kerr.

The payments, which will go directly to partners whose applications are accepted and funded, will at the least offset the costs of providing the proof-of-concept trials — and help pay for their eventual deployments, he said.

“That goes to the reseller who applies for it, and once approved, they do that work for the customer.”

Zerto has technology alliances today with cloud providers Microsoft and Amazon and is working on similar arrangements with Google.

Kerr did not say how much money overall has been put aside to boost the channel program.

The monetary payments are being made to help cover the expenses of channel partners who are laying out money to make a sale before they’ve ever received a signed contract for services, said Kerr.

“It doesn’t pay for the whole deployment but helps the channel partner take the risk to show off the product using money that can help them sell it to a customer,” he said.

The program is new for 2019 after being tested internally with a small number of channel partners in 2018. Selected partners test-drove the awards program last year and it was deemed a success, according to Kerr.

“For 2019 we are making it available to every channel partner that is a Microsoft and Zerto partner,” he said.

Most Zerto partners already meet that requirement, he added.

Rob Strechay, Zerto’s senior vice president of product, said the company sells its products and services 100 percent through the channel, focusing on disaster recovery, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), data replication, backup, continuous availability, workload mobility and cloud mobility. Zerto IT Resilience brings together backup, disaster recovery and cloud mobility into one scalable platform.

Zerto’s Rob Strechay

The company’s latest update, Zerto IT Resilience 7, is expected to ship early in the second quarter, said Strechay.

Jim Ortbals, the company’s vice president of worldwide channel and cloud adoption, said one of its continuing strategies is to deepen its relationship with its channel partners.

“There are a lot of providers and partners out there who are looking to maximize their reach and sales with each customer,” he said. “The tool set that we’ve got allows them to penetrate much more into the stack. It helps them help customers with migration to the cloud and with virtual machines on the back end as well.”

Zerto works with about 350 cloud provider partners and with about 1,000 reseller partners.

The company will hold its ZertoCon user conference, May 20-22, in Nashville.