Altaro's global customer base has crossed the 40,000 organization threshold, the Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere backup and disaster recovery (BDR) provider announced today.
It’s a key milestone for a company that began bootstrapping itself back in 2009 with just four employees. Altaro's first outing was a consumer-facing product, but in 2012 the company launched its first Hyper-V product focused on the small and midsized enterprise (SME) market.
Armed with that product the company turned its focus to the channel, CEO David Vella says. “We realized that the only way for us to grow in the SME space specifically is to go for the channel,” Vella tells ChannelE2E.
Nowadays, Altaro is focused on expanding its channel integration. In Europe, the company already works 100 percent within the channel. Partner sales also are growing in America. The channel-centric push has led to the rapid adoption of its VM Backup across every continent, the company asserts.
Channel Talent
Still, channel success requires channel talent. That's where Eric Krauss enters the picture. Before joining Altaro as VP of sales for the Americas, Krauss had built up nearly 25 years of experience working within the channel.
"We’re putting a lot of resources in place to expand the channel,” he says. “If we want to scale our organization, if we want to grow as our plans unfold, the channel is and remains a very strong component of that.”
Admittedly, Altaro has some direct sales in North America. “But as long as our price points are such and our margins are such that our partners have the opportunity to reap that business, there will always be an advantage for a customer to go through a partner,” Krauss says. “It’s up to us now to help drive that business into our channel. And it’s also up to us to help build a strong channel where our customers can go to and work with someone they trust in their own local community or who they do business with today as we grow that channel community.”
Altaro's parter program includes four tiers: Bronze, silver, gold -- plus an MSP-centric track. Each of them has different pricing and discount structures, Klauss explains. But the MSP offering is a fixed cost on a per-VM basis.
“So this really offers the MSP partner the opportunity to build a solid business case around that,” he says. “Each of them determines what additional features or functionality or service they want to add on to their services and pushing up their user community, but that allows them to set the pricing where they see fit based on additional components that they have.”
The Virtual Machine Market
Virtualization is nearly ubiquitous these days. That means Altaro partners have plenty of opportunities to pursue.
Still, plenty of competition looms. Veeam is perhaps the best-known provider of VMware-centric backup, and the company also has a growing Hyper-V base. Dozens of additional backup, disaster recovery (BDR) and business continuity companies are in the market.
Nevertheless, Altaro's installed base keeps growing. Among the milestones:
- More than 10,000 customers are now connected to Altaro’s recently-introduced Multi-Tenant Cloud Management Console.
- More than 400,000 Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines are protected with Altaro VM Backup.
- After launching its MSP program, more than 8,000 VMs are backed up every month through its monthly subscription program.
And the company says its growth rate is accelerating, with sales expanding 40 percent over the same time period last year. Plus, according to Klauss, it's hard to beat Altaro’s customer service.
“I think we’re easier to do business with than other vendors out there. I’m very confident that our support is superior to some of the other vendors that are out there,” he says. “We get a tremendous amount of unsolicited feedback telling us how phenomenal our tech support and customer service is. And I think from that is where you build a lot of the trust.”
“There are other vendors out there that offer good tech support, that offer good customer service, and are trustworthy. But there’s a lot of vendors that aren’t doing all three successfully.”
