Wasabi, Four Years In

Over my career I’ve worked with and helped create many partner programs from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. Most of them viewed the channel as a growth engine to help them differentiate and compete. However, all these companies had one thing in common; they didn’t truly commit to their channel strategy.

To truly commit to being a channel-focused company doesn’t mean you have to forgo enterprise sales efforts, but it does mean that you must eliminate distractions and conflict within your teams. It means your executive leadership, from the CEO down, must be fully committed to investing in this strategy with the best resources available and realistic goals.

Channel programs that compensated their enterprise sales teams to work with partners were always far more successful because they aligned their goals and objectives as a true force multiplier. I’ve also seen many where the CEO said one thing publicly in favor of the channel and then behind closed doors contradicted themselves, which ended up hurting the company long-term.

Which reminds me of one of my all-time favorite comedies, Tommy Boy with the late great Chris Farley! If you haven’t seen this true classic of American Cinema, I strongly encourage you to give it a shot.  The story follows Tommy Callahan and his difficult path to learning how to run his father’s automotive parts company after he unexpectedly passes away. Tommy goes on an extended sales road-trip with his former high-school classmate Richard (played by David Spade) who was his father’s protégé to try and save the company by finding the right national distributor to help take their products to market. Tommy's challenge was how to increase sales quickly enough to save the company, their employee’s jobs and ultimately the community who depend on this factory in their small town. Much like the technology space, we work with distributors, resellers, services/solution providers as well as technology alliances to enhance our value proposition and bring our solutions to the market.

And this is one thing that Wasabi does better than any other company I’ve ever worked for. Creation and execution of an amazing channel strategy led first by the focus on technology alliances to create a “better together” story. This strategic partnership approach ultimately results in a win for us, our partners, and the customers.

We partner with  leading technology vendors providing a strong complement to their offerings and creating a significant competitive advantage for their customers. Combined with a strong distribution, reseller, and MSP strategy that provides deal registration, MDF and the best marketing team in technology, and you get a winning recipe for global domination of the cloud storage space.

When it comes to channel strategies and partner programs, Wasabi walks the walk.  When we say we will share contacts and do account mappings, we follow through with an action plan that works for everyone. We put resources into joint marketing events, webinars and campaigns to drive value for both us and our alliance partners. When was the last time an AWS rep joined your partner or customer call to help you close business? Well, that’s rhetorical because the answer is NEVER. Wasabi cares, and proves it day in and day out!

How can I make such claims you ask… Well, here are a few points to back this up:

In only 4 short years since Wasabi’s launch:

• We have 350+ technology alliance partners that support over a dozen use-cases and cloud strategies
• We have over 5,200 resellers and MSPs and are on track to growing that to over 10,000
• We have over 23,000 customers saving 80% on their cloud storage every day
• We just raised $112 Million in Series C funding, for a total of nearly $250 Million since launch
• Recognition from CRN (The Channel Company) with top awards consistently include:
  • Channel Chiefs
  • Cloud Partner Programs
  • Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors
  • Storage 100
  • Tech Innovators
  • and more…

So the next time you think about your cloud storage needs and who to partner with and why, think about Wasabi, and help us continue proving that we’re better together representing the best in data management!