Storage Provider PiKNiK Nabs Channel Vet Michael Fair as CRO

CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO — Channel vet Michael Fair, previously with Fusion Connect and Spectrum, has taken the role of chief revenue officer at storage provider PiKNiK.

PikNik’s Michael Fair

PikNik is the largest storage provider in North American for Filecoin, a distributed storage provider based on blockchain and cryptocurrency. Fair will be building out PiKNiK’s channel initiative.

Fair previously was Fusion Connect’s senior vice president of channels and alliances. He left that role in March.

Before that, he was vice president of channel alliances and national accounts at Spectrum. Moreover, he led partner programs at EarthLink and Qwest.

PiKNiK was founded in October 2020. This past February, it expanded its compute cluster and storage network into a data center footprint.

In a Q&A with Channel Futures, Fair talks about how channel will play a big role in PiKNiK’s future business.

Channel Futures: Why did you want to take this role with PiKNiK?

Michael Fair: I’ve been doing consulting for the past six seven months and been spending time in CCaaS, cybersecurity and then in what I’m calling this Web 3.0 infrastructure, which is based on emerging technologies that are decentralized versus centralized. And I kind of bumped into Filecoin, which is the currency behind Protocol Labs. And PiKNiK is the largest service provider in North America utilizing that technology.

CF: Is this role a departure for you from a technology aspect and what you’re doing?

MF: It’s kind of an expanded role as chief revenue officer. We’re going to be majority, if not entirely channel oriented, so selling through distribution channels. We’ll be selling through colocation providers and MSPs, as well as agents. There’s also kind of a dual channel strategy through multiple avenues to get to the end users. So that’s really the goal right now. So I’ve got full revenue responsibility as a global responsibility as well.

CF: Is channel now part of PiKNiK’s go to market, or will you be introducing that?

MF: It’s a very nascent technology right now so it’s a startup company. But it’s a very well-funded startup company. Its initial customers have mostly been like university archives, very deep backup storage, kind of in lieu of tape backup or … cloud storage. So the initial sales have been direct. With me coming on board, I’m going to be really focusing on a channel-only strategy going forward. It really has no direct salesforce. It’s really the CEO selling a couple of the largest original deals, but it’s really going to be a channel strategy.

CF: What kinds of opportunities will there be for the different partner types?

MF: For agents, it’s an immediate opportunity to bring their storage customers onto the PiKNiK infrastructure. That’ll be the first real target, agents that have university customers.

MSPs or colocation providers that sell storage today have an opportunity to adopt the Filecoin infrastructure and participate from that perspective. Think about this as the Uber or Airbnb of storage. It’s a decentralized capability that already is extremely disruptive. And much like other infrastructure type plays that are based on …