Hitachi Vantara Channel Chief Reviews Key Milestones, Shares Goals

Hitachi Vantara is now responding to partners faster on several fronts, according to Kimberly King, the storage vendor’s channel chief. King said Hitachi has expedited quoting and deal approvals, simplified deal registration, made training concise and added more marketing content.

King, Hitachi Vantara’s senior VP of strategic partners and alliances, quantified the benefits of those improvements last week. Among them, the company now approves more than 60% of all partner deals within an hour.

In addition, Hitachi is now providing more content on its marketing hub, including more localization. That has resulted in a 1,127% increase in logins and a 1,300% boost in marketing activity this year.

Hitachi Vantara’s Kimberly King

King also noted that early returns based on recent upgrades to Hitachi’s deal registration system has resulted in a 115% increase in deals registered and closed year over year.

Hitachi has reduced the duration of learning content, with sessions as short as just 5 minutes. The longest sessions are no more than an hour. As a result, the number of partners that have used Hitachi’s learning modules has increased fourfold, according to King. Between July and November, she noted that partners engaged with 43,320 learning modules.

Since launching its Partner Connect digital selling platform last year, the number of deal registrations increased 324% and monthly logins grew 225%. The milestones, outlined in a blog posted late last week, make her case that the changes implemented are working.

Meanwhile, Hitachi recently refreshed its Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) portfolio with upgraded VSP 5000 series and E Series hardware.  A new version of the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) object storage software is also now available. In a recent interview with Channel Futures, King discussed the inroads Hitachi Vantara has made in 2021, including the addition of 400 new partners. Here’s an edited except of that interview.

Channel Futures: How would you characterize the current state of the Hitachi Vantara partner ecosystem this year?

Kimberly King: We’ve been expanding our ecosystem of partners. I would say we’ve probably added about 400 new partners across the world. We’re expanding aggressively, everywhere.

CF: What type of partners have you brought on?

KK: A little bit of everything. A lot of resellers and some new VARs, and we’ve consolidated our distributors. We’ve also added a lot of cloud service provider partners around the world. Typically, we were working with Computer Center and ThinkOn and CBTS and a bunch of the other sort of well-known names, and now we’ve expanded out from there. So Logicalis is now creating a virtual storage-as-a-service solution with us, and they’re going to market in South Africa. We’re looking to do the same things in Latin America and other parts of the world.

CF: As it pertains to your traditional VARs and resellers, are they shifting to the as-a-service model or are they still focused on reselling?

KK: A little bit of both. They want to move to as-a-service, and I think the easier we make it with our EverFlex licensing model, they can do that and not have the requirement of a huge outlay. But they’re leveraging what the customer wants to do versus us demanding that they move to this model.

CF: How would you break down where customers are today?

KK: I would say probably about 40% of what we’re seeing is moving more to as-a-service or cloud. It’s not quite up to the 50%, 60%, 70% or 100% levels. A lot of folks are talking about it going that high; I just don’t see that happening just yet.

CF: When do you see it happening?

KK: I don’t know if I ever see it being 100%. I think we’ve been talking about …