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Unitrends expands its channel presence in North America and beyond
By Alan Thwaits
07.10.06

Unitrends, a provider of business continuity solutions based in Columbia, South Carolina, is aggressively courting new channel partners in North America and beyond.

Among new regional solution providers and nationally based resellers the company has recently added to its channel partner network are Michigan-based network specialists Trivalent Group, Inc. and Sentral Systems, Ltd., a U.K.-based provider of servers and load balancers. Sentral is the first international distributor to sign on as a reseller of Unitrends' Rapid Recovery Systems.

"News about the benefits that our solutions deliver, and our quality support, is getting out in the marketplace, and we find potential partners and prospects are now coming to us," said Sterling Wharton, president and CEO of Unitrends. "They recognize the value of the solution we have built for SMEs, and appreciate the level of our support for our partners and customers. We have gained significant traction in these areas, and will use that to build further momentum in the coming quarters."

Unitrends' product line of integrated data and system protection appliances provides Business Systems Continuity solutions for SMEs, including its Rapid Recovery System.

"Unitrends was originally a tape archival backup company, and later changed to a continuous data protection focus," said Steve Hammond, senior vice president, Business Development Company Growth, Unitrends. "In the last couple of years, the company has had a business continuity and recovery angle, by embedding our software on an appliance. Now we focus on continuous business protection. This is a natural complement for our partners, many of whom offer services on and off site to their customers."

Unitrends channel partners sell and support Unitrends Rapid Recovery appliances on a standalone basis, and have established themselves as a Vaulting Service Provider (VSP), with the appliances, Unitrends' offsite Data Protection Vaults (DPV) and Secure Data Sync, to enable their customers to electronically and securely vault key information offsite for disaster recovery purposes.

"People usually think about big natural disasters, but they really don't happen all that often," said Hammond. "The real issues are human issue, patch failures, and malware, which go on all the time. We solve those problems."

The focus for Unitrends' channel partners, and for Unitrends itself, is the mid-market.

"We focus on the mid-range," said Hammond. "because it's easier to communicate to the end-user at that level. We tale enterprise capability to the mid-range. That offers us and our partners the best opportunities for near-term revenue. Our focus is on getting organizations back to business immediately."

Hammond added that, while Sentral Systems is Unitrends first push beyond North America, Unitrends plans to continue to expand its channel efforts internaitonally, as well as aggressively seeking partners in Canada and Mexico.


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