Back in the day, Arcserve was a leading light of the channel that rode many of those relationships into becoming a leader in the backup and recovery software market. Then Arcserve was acquired by what became CA Technologies, and it became something of a challenge for solution providers in the channel to navigate their way through an organization that relied more on direct than indirect sales.
Flash forward to 2014, and Arcserve is once again an independent entity after being spun out of a CA Technologies organization that is now focused on enterprise IT organizations, versus the small and midsize business (SMB) customers Arcserve primarily serves.
Although Arcserve has been overshadowed by a larger organization, investments in the company’s core technologies continue, CEO Mike Crest said. In fact, Crest noted that Arcserve has long supported image-based backups and replication even though the market is just now moving in that direction.
In general, Crest said that one thing that differentiates Arcserve most is a unified approach to data protection that provides many advanced data protection capabilities as a feature, rather than an additional product that has to be managed via a separate console.
As an independent company, Arcserve will enjoy a lot more latitude when it comes to the channel. Executing channel strategies inside an organization with a large direct sales forces is a lot more challenging than it is for an independent company that is once again 100 percent focused on the channel, Crest said.
Obviously, there is no shortage of competition when it comes to data protection. But with 43,000 customers in 50 countries and with more than 100 distribution partners and a network of 7,500 resellers and 700 managed services providers, Crest said, Arcserve now stands a better chance of succeeding via the channel than it ever did inside a much larger multibillion dollar entity.
Michael Vizard has been covering IT issues in the enterprise for 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWEEK, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review.
