SecureData, Hitachi in channel deal

Under the arrangement, SecureData has also been granted Platinum partner status by HDS for the sale of its storage box, the Thunder 9500V series and the reseller will lend its technical, managerial and business expertise to managed services and storage initiatives undertaken by the vendor.

“We've already had another successful engagement with Network Appliance (NA) in the past six to eight months,” said Evan Penn, MD at SecureData.

NA has been tapping SecureData's whole of infrastructure skills which the reseller has been building on for some time, he said.

Penn said its skills help Network Appliance pitch consulting and other services beyond storage such as disaster recovery and security to their clients. “The same can be done with HDS. It's already looking promising,” he said. “It's almost like we [SecureData] are the glue between the vendors with multi-vendor solutions - vendors themselves don't work well with each other,” Penn said.

SecureData and HDS recently tendered together on a State government deal which included the requirement for disk backup, Veritas software and disaster recovery. “HDS decided that they didn't have the skills [in some areas] so they partnered with SecureData,” Penn said. Penn wouldn't elaborate any further about the details of the tender.

Penn said HDS was “not a large account at this stage” but had potential over the next 12 months, adding that he expected to do “several million” in HDS related sales over the period.

He claimed that the reseller had been through “trials and tribulations” over the past 18 months with storage vendors taking business direct, but the situation had gone full circle. “They're coming back to an indirect model - as long as we've got the value to add. I think they [HDS] have a strong channel ethic,” he said.