Unlocking the Secret to Igniting Partner Growth

People say that nobody gets to the top alone, and here at Wasabi, we know that’s true. A major part of our growing success has been our partners—the software vendors, systems integrators, and managed service providers (MSPs) that integrate Wasabi into their customer solutions. In less than a year since our launch, we’ve built up a roster of more than one hundred companies that recognize the value of our vision for delivering high-performance cloud storage at commodity pricing.

What’s the secret? Make. Things. Easy.

Keep it simple with standards

We knew early on that the more obstacles your product presents to developers and vendors, the less likely they are to use it. Seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many companies forget that fact.

The drive toward industry standards is a desire for simplification. Standards simplify and speed up development, ease integration, and accelerate widespread adoption. Establishing a standard API for cloud storage is a cornerstone of Wasabi’s vision for turning cloud storage into an inexpensive, one-size-fits-all, universal utility.

In cloud storage today, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 API is the de facto standard. If you’re a third-party app developer in this space, odds are you’re designing your products to work with S3. That’s why when we were developing Wasabi hot cloud storage, we made the conscious decision to mirror S3’s API, bit by bit.

As a developer, when you look at someone else’s code, you almost always find quirks or things you would do differently. But since our goal was 100% compatibility, we soon stopped questioning the Amazon developers and followed their lead, quirks and all. The result is standardization: If your app works on AWS S3, it will work exactly the same way on Wasabi. You simply plug it into our system and it works. It’s that easy and immediate.

Our Performance and Certification Team (PACT) continually tests applications to ensure that they work seamlessly with Wasabi hot storage. We also provide a wealth of documentation on our website and in our knowledge base to make it even easier for developers to work with us.

Support compliance in highly regulated industries

In healthcare, there’s HIPAA. The financial industry has FINRA. Criminal justice agencies are subject to CJIS. And the entire continent of Europe–and everyone that works with Europe–will soon be faced with the GDPR. These regulatory mandates cover a wide variety of rules about how data is stored and used—so compliance is a huge issue for us.

Wasabi hot cloud storage keeps users compliant. It’s just one more way we keep things easy. We stay abreast of the latest guidelines across industries and ensure that our storage services always stay within those constraints.

We also offer something that some of the big guys don’t: configurable data immutability. That means that customers can designate all or portions of their data as unchangeable and undeletable—even by system admins. This immutability aids compliance because it eliminates the possibility of tampering or data loss whether by human error or malicious intent.

Anticipate partner needs and rise to meet them

In addition to simplifying app development for developers, we work hard to make it easy for our partners to do business with us.

First off, our product itself is an easy sell: 80% cheaper than AWS S3 and 6x the speed. We like making our partners look good to their end users—and offering this kind of price/performance helps them to attract and retain customers.

But also important is the way we support our partners, offering services that help them stay productive and profitable. One example of this is how we can break billing into buckets for resellers and MSPs. That makes it easy, for instance, for an MSP of a network of medical facilities across the country to see how each location is using storage. Other examples are APIs that enable partners to develop apps for their ends users, and our continuing open dialogue with partners about specific features and functionalities they’d like to see.

Lower the Resistance and They Will Come

The key to partner growth is deceptively simple: make it easy for them. Offering a stellar product at an amazing price is critical. But in addition to that, we work to enable seamless third-party app integration, aid regulatory compliance and offer continual support for a wide range of selling models. We’re proud to work with such a range of varied and talented partners—and can’t wait to discover new connections and companies in the coming year.