As technologies and business models continue to evolve within our industry, it’s only natural that our channel partnerships evolve as well. These podcast interviews, co-hosted by ChannelE2E’s Content Czar Joe Panettieri and CompTIA President and CEO Todd Thibodeaux, talk with channel chiefs to get their perspective on how these relationships are shifting in the presence of innovation.
Sungard Availability Services’ Carmen Sorice, SVP of global channel sales, talks disaster recovery services amid natural disasters and new cyber threats like ransomware, and how channel partners fit into Sungard’s go to market strategy.
Q: Customers out task their whole recovery to your company. Where do channel partners fit into the conversation?
A: Channel partners are a core element in our go to market strategy. We have various programs with our partners. Many are sell-with programs, where we work with partners alongside our sales teams. We also have reseller programs and referral programs.
Q: Are you seeing businesses become more aware of their obligations around disaster recovery?
A: Yes, we definitely see a different, evolving approach to disaster recovery. What’s interesting is, the hurricanes, the earthquakes, the natural disasters – they don’t’ really change. They have always been here and they always will be here. What has changed is customers realizing that the impact they feel when one of these events happens is much more extreme. It really has to do with the fact that most customers are living in a digital world. They have a digital strategy and much of their company – their processes and their systems – are based on digital infrastructure and digital applications that have to be running. Customers are also becoming more sensitive to the impact of outages due to security breaches. We think of security breaches as just a breach. Well, in fact, it’s a type of outage. Not only is the infrastructure and the applications out, but there’s brand tarnishing that happens when those security violations occur.
Q: How much of a conversation is ransomware with your customer and partner base?
A: I think it is a big issue. We’re seeing a trend of it becoming more of an issue and not less of an issue. For example, we’re working with a large global financial services firm on not just a backup system, but a tertiary system. They have a production system and a backup system, of course. But, what they recognized is that when there’s a security breach and data is impacted and contaminated, not only was their production site vulnerable, but their backup site was vulnerable. So, they needed a solution that provided tertiary backup that had the data isolated so it wasn’t vulnerable to the same kind of data contamination that their backup site was. When you start getting into not just backup, but tertiary backup, it tells you what the threat is out there.
