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Backup and business continuity provider Unitrends Monday unveiled an enhanced and refreshed Channel and Alliance Program, and the appointment of vice president of channel sales Clark Brown as its new channel chief.

The program includes new tools and resources for Unitrends partners to help them accelerate the growth of their businesses. Unitrends said it’s focused on allowing partners to “capture more leads, generate greater margin and create recurring revenue with less integration hassle and less support expenses than any other vendor in the market.”

Unitrends’ Clark Brown

Brown tells us that his company spent “a lot of time talking to our partners about what matters most to them in a vendor partner.” In May, Kaseya announced a merger with Unitrends.

“The two most important factors outside of great products were ease of doing business and strong margin opportunities,” he said. “The enhancements to the program are in direct response to this feedback. We also recognized the importance of taking care of our best partners — those that have been committed to growing their business with Unitrends and continue to invest in the partnership.”

New resources and benefits include: a new tiered sales structure; a market development funds (MDF) pool; a new partner portal with a library of collateral and content to co-brand for various marketing campaigns; and a new channel partner advisory board to help guide the direction of the overall channel program.

The new program addresses the key issue of “declining margins from competitors” that have saturated the market with resellers, Brown said.

“The program enhancements are designed to provide industry-leading margins to partners that invest their time and technical resources in Unitrends,” he said. “In addition, we selectively recruit partners across our sales regions focusing on quality vs. quantity of resellers. The program also helps address the issue/challenges of limited marketing and lead-generation capabilities. The new program and portal provide partners with the ability to easily plan and execute effective lead-generating campaigns. This includes the ability to produce co-branded collateral and to execute email campaigns quickly with rich content. Lastly, the new program distributes thousands of leads directly to partners.”

Brown said his goal as channel chief is to expand Unitrends’ footprint in the backup and disaster recovery market via its 100 percent channel model while offering partners the “best technology and highest gross profit margins in the industry.”

“A year from now, we look to have a broader-reaching, more engaged channel partner community working together with us to capitalize on the growing backup and disaster recovery market that is critical to every business, government agency and education institution,” he said.

“We have been a Unitrends partner for more than five years and have seen first-hand the immense business gains from this partnership,” said Matt Auld, Peak Uptime‘s vice president of cloud services. “Operating as both a reseller and a managed service provider, Unitrends is one of our key differentiators against the competition for our cloud-based service. One enhanced aspect of the Unitrends partner program that I am really excited about it is the upcoming new marketing automation capabilities. Multi-touch email marketing campaigns are critical to nurturing our customer relationships. With Unitrends’ new automated services, we’ll be able to constantly stay in touch with our clients and keep our funnel full for future cross-sell and upsell opportunities.”

The Unitrends partner program includes more than 2,000 partners globally. Current members include authorized resellers; silver, gold and platinum authorized distributors; certified implementation partners; certified education partners; authorized referral partners; and technology alliance partners.