Partners can utilise the differentiation of immutable object storage to ensure that customers bounce back and can further disrupt traditional storage solutions that are not as immutable, says Eric LeBlanc at Scality.
Describe your current job role and a summary of the business model of your organisation?
Eric LeBlanc is Scality’s Vice President, Worldwide Channel Sales and GM of ARTESCA. Scality is a 100% channel-focused company, offering RING, which creates modern cloud data centres, ARTESCA for a simple, secure solution for effective cyber-resiliency against ransomware attacks.
What are your strengths and abilities that you bring to the above role?
Eric has an affinity for growing product lines through the channel and implementing strong repeatable channel sales strategies. In the last year, he successfully repositioned ARTESCA as a ransomware protection solution purpose-built for partners. This fuelled a 500% year-over-year product line growth rate, all driven by channel-led business.
Please describe the opportunities and challenges that exist for channel partners in your market?
188 Zettabytes of data will be stored globally by 2025, and 80% will be unstructured. At the same time, ransomware attacks are skyrocketing, with backup repositories targeted in at least 93% of ransomware attacks. This exponential data growth and the threat of ransomware presents numerous challenges for end user organisations, who must ensure that business operations continue as normal despite inevitable attacks.
End users will rely on channel partners to guide them through these challenges, and this represents a key opportunity for the channel that will only grow throughout the coming years.
Which technologies and innovations can make a difference to the channel market dynamics in the near future?
With unstructured data exploding, object storage is fast becoming the new standard. Unlike other forms of storage, the underlying architecture of object storage was designed to handle data at Peta-byte scale and grow as an organisation’s capacity needs grow.
It organises information into containers of flexible sizes and uses keys to uniquely identify each object and simply retrieve specific data. Combined with metadata tagging that object storage provides, this helps to keep data accessible and optimised for data archiving, data lakes and AI, ML.
Delivering a combination of speed, scale, and simplicity, it also provides a critical last line of defence against cyber threats with immutability. Immutability secures data against loss or change, whether intentional or not. This means that by protecting data with immutability as soon as it is written, data can be quickly and easily recovered.
What is more, unlike traditional immutability features deployed as snapshots, object storage implements immutability on the bottom system layer. This means that every record, even those made a nanosecond apart, cannot be overwritten, deleted or modified.
How can a channel partner disrupt the regional market and gain a leading competitive position?
Ransomware is coming fast and furious. It is now not a question of if you will be attacked but how many times you will be attacked – and does your technology stack have the resilience to bounce back from this?
Partners can utilise the differentiation of immutable object storage to ensure that their customers can bounce back. Partners can disrupt traditional storage solutions that are not as scalable or immutable with real-time data preservation in case of an attack.
Which non-competitive business do you admire for its channel drive and strategy?
Veeam is very worthy of a mention here. The company has been able to get 450,000+ customers thanks to the recruitment of 35,000+ partners over the past decade. Its strong channel ecosystem, agility, and cyber resiliency positioning are key to its success.
Which aspects of your job role do you find rewarding and which challenging?
Eric finds that the most rewarding part of his role is recruiting and onboarding new partners and growing their Scality pipeline and business with them. Recently, Eric has implemented a new accreditation programme and incentives, challenges that award prizes for deal registrations and won business.
He has also pushed training programmes to help channel partners meet demand. All these new initiatives have a unique objective: make them able to do incremental business with Scality quickly.
The main challenge is that it takes time for a new VAR to create a significant pipeline and close business. As soon as they have decided to engage with Scality, Eric’s #1 priority is to help them focus on this activity with joint initiatives from day one and in parallel with the enablement process.
How do you best like to de-stress and re-charge off work?
Outside of work, Eric enjoys spending time with his family, playing sports, and reading.
