Zadara Expands Portfolio with Compute-as-a-Service, Hires New Channel Lead

Zadara, known for enterprise storage-as-a-service, recently expanded its cloud platform to include compute-as-a-service solutions for MSPs. At the same time, the cloud services provider, this month, announced new top leadership hires in channel, sales and marketing.

Zadara’s Joe Sacchetti

Joseph Sacchetti is the new senior director of channels, North America and Gene Cunningham is the vice president of sales, North America. Earlier this year, the company hired Tim DaRosa as the new CMO, and Lauren Koszarek as vice president of marketing.

Zadara’s Nelson Nahum

“Our upward trajectory shows no signs of slowing down and our growth numbers are in large part due to the strength of our channel partners,” Nelson Nahum, CEO and founder of Zadara said. “Zadara’s cloud services platform provides enormous value to service providers and the enterprise and addresses an expressed need for consumption-based services.”

In June, the company, founded in 2011, noted that year over year gross profits increased by 93%. Zadara attributed the growth to new customer wins, growth of its global partner and MSP network and market conditions that increased the need for flexible storage solutions. The company’s channel currently has 300 partners globally for 100% year over year growth. Zadara embraces all partner types – traditional VAR, MSP, solution providers, consultants and, more recently, colocation providers.

“Zadara is an inflection point. Up until a year ago, channel sales were about 50 percent and about 30% three years ago,” said Sacchetti. “Today, the channel is embracing as a service and we’re about 90% channel.”

Partners as Experts

All new business goes through partners. “The company realizes in order to achieve greatness, we must utilize the channel,” he added. “We want to work with partners deeply and make them experts.”

According to Sacchetti, Zadara embraces the six pillars of success in the channel.

• Your product can be packaged and easily sold.
• Offer excellent margins.
• Registration with integrity: bulletproof, reliable and trackable.
• A partner portal as the central repository for everything.
• The creation of services opportunities for the VAR; certifications and cross-vendor tech alliances.
• Reinvestment.

The company is interested in expanding its channel ecosystem. New partners will have engineering expertise and expertise in storage and compute.

Zadara announced compute-as-a-service in partnership with NeoKarm, who has a multi-cloud hybrid platform. Today, the Zadara Cloud Platform offers compute and storage as a fully managed, cloud-agnostic platform.

“If you look at the last one year, five years and nine years, we see this wave of folks that realize that embracing the cloud is what makes sense,” said Sacchetti. “It began with placing storage in the cloud and storage-as-a-service was the initial offering for Zadara. The most logical progression is to offer the compute platform and it’s what customers asked for.”

Zadara customers cross vertical industries. However, key markets include healthcare, life sciences, retail, and more recently entertainment, oil and gas and law enforcement. Businesses range in size from small and medium enterprise to larger enterprise.