Cloud distributor Pax8 today announced a new partnership with business continuity and disaster recovery solutions vendor StorageCraft, adding the vendor’s ShadowProtect BDR solution, File Backup and Recovery system, Cloud Backup for Office 365 and G Suite, and Cloud Services disaster recovery-as-a-service offering to the Pax8 line card, starting now.
Ryan Walsh, chief channel officer at Pax8, announced the partnership at the ASCII SMB IT Success Summit in Bethesda, Md., which is taking place now. Partners had been asking the distributor to bring on the ShadowProtect bare-metal backup solution, he says, adding that StorageCraft met all the criteria for a Pax8 vendor partner: high quality products, good margin, automation, and commitment to the Pax8 model.
Pax8, he says, is very selective. “We don’t have an approach that says just come on in if you want to get on our line card,” Walsh told ChannelPro at the ASCII event. Rather, he says, enough partners have to be asking for a product, and the product has to “interact with Pax8 cloud’s marketplace in the way that our partners want … which means you’ve got to have an API to automatically turn on the service.”
Onboarding a new vendor partner is a six to eight week process typically, Walsh says. “We have to be able to support these products from the beginning of the buying journey all the way to the end for that partner and their customers. So we have to know how to sell it. We have to know how to market it. We have to help provision it or turn it on automatically from our cloud marketplace, and then we’re not done. [We] support it if somebody has a question, and then make sure the bill’s right. So we have to support that all the way through for every vendor that we have. We don’t take that lightly.”
“We are excited to partner with Pax8, engage with their MSP partner community, and provide access to our award-winning cloud backup solutions,” said Shridar Subramanian, vice president of marketing and product management at StorageCraft, in a press statement. “With Pax8 and StorageCraft, MSPs will have access to channel-centric solutions to ensure optimization, data protection and containment, configuration, and end-to-end support.”
Pax8 added data protection vendors Acronis and Dropsuite to its line card last November, along with security vendors†Passportal, Proofpoint, and IRONSCALES.
