VMblog recently caught up with Carter McCrary, VP of Global Revenue at FalconStor, to find out more about the company, its partners, sales and customers.

VMBlog:  How do you conduct your sales teams' sales motion at FalconStor?

Carter McCrary:  We have FalconStor team members in North America, EMEA, and Greater Asia.  Our teams manage our pipeline which is approximately 80% channel driven with our partners.  We're committed to be our partners best business continuity and long-term archival partner and strive to ensure each partner's success. Our team develops new targeted opportunities to help generation new business across all our partners.

Being heterogenous and agnostic software suite, we work well with partners with a multi-vendor approach. I enjoy working together to build the businesses and bring significant value to our mutual customers. With over 20 years of experience working alongside the world's leading technology companies, my goal is to leverage FalconStor's insight and expertise to be an indispensable asset to our partners' business.

VMBlog:  Who are your current partners?

McCrary:  We have a number of excellent partners across the world. With our new, innovative StorSafe, a Linux-based container archival software, we are seeing numerous applications from potential partners over this last year, as the value and benefits from both a technical and economic perspective are solidified. 

One of our best partners is Hitachi. We executed an agreement with Hitachi and completed a deep integration to leverage StorSafe and Hitachi's HCP object storage system, which has already delivered over 20PB of storage sold by Hitachi with more deals in the pipeline. Wasabi, Dynamic Solutions (DSI), Fujitsu, and Bechtle are a few others.  We have an exclusive relationship in South Korea with our longtime, award winning partner, Gayadata. There is a listing of our partners on our website at www.falconstor.com.

VMBlog:  How has StorSafe changed your sales approach?

McCrary:  With StorSafe and its ability to seamlessly and heterogeneously integrate with legacy data and new data generating applications, we have seen high demand for general backup consolidation and archive and tape migration solutions to resolve remote management and employee safety challenges.  And, we seen data migration to the major clouds for long-term archival for compliance, regulatory, legal eDiscovery, and privacy mandates.

The flexibility of the Linux-based containers has delivered a quantum leap in capability allowing our best-in-class deduplication of data to be leveraged across numerous storage endpoints. Between FalconStor existing capabilities and StorSafe's innovations, we able to transfer high value data assets to physical tape, NAS, Object Storage, and any S3 enabled Cloud, as well as IBM COS and Microsoft Azure.  The capability to manage twenty-year-old legacy data, as well as manage newly generated data has opened numerous paths to market for us.

With the container architecture and Open Source support, partners and customers understand that we can manage data accessibility well into the future. With StorSafe, there is an enormous cost savings which is a competitive advantage for our customers.  StorSafe has open up so many paths to market from legacy data to new data across most all industries, we are growing rapidly.

VMBlog:  With StorSafe, customers can control where they want their data to reside and when?

McCrary:  Absolutely.  Since we are a software only company, we are in the business of business continuity and long-term data management and archival, not the disk drive business. We believe data should be portable because retention periods continue to extend upwards to 100 years for specific data types and mandates and into perpetuity for historical data like, seismic data, movies, and other high value digital assets.

With a traditional storage system strategy, a company would have to copy and verify data integrity 10 to 15 times over the data lifecycle, as systems end-of-life and new ones come online. The TCO over ten years is quite astounding, but manageable; however, the cost model over 50 and 100 years of mandated data retention is staggering. As data volume compounds and retention period extends, the traditional model becomes quite cost prohibitive. 

With the Cloud migration, StorSafe supports all major cloud providers. We believe that data portability should be paramount, as business needs shift and requirements change, or data accessibility demands reduces over time and the data shift down storage tiers.

In talking to our partners and customers, they want to have a choice in the Cloud(s) they use, as well as have the ability to change if necessary. We have seen where a new government regulation mandates where a company can and cannot store data and a customer had to move the data. Portability is critical to relocate the data in this developing and mercurial retention enviroment.

VMBlog:  So, Carter, you mentioned that FalconStor cannot keep up with current demand. Are you actively hiring during this challenging time?

McCrary:  Yes, we are looking for high caliber individuals with deep storage knowledge and have openings for Sales Account Managers and Sales Engineers.  The three major factors fueling expansion are general backup and archive, IBM ProtecTIER, and Remote Management/Employee Safety.

Due to the current environment, the work at home paradigm has created the need for significantly more backup and archive capability and storage space than a year ago.

With IBM i ProtecTIER being end-of-life in October, we have seen a significant growth in our ProtecTIER replacement business, and we are looking for professionals with IBM i skillsets. FalconStor has had a twenty-year relationship with IBM on their IBM i and ProtecTIER BRMS integration. And, we have extended our capabilities with IBM COS integration. We had a number of customers leveraging StorSafe as a replacement to ProtecTIER, and using StorSafe to migrate IBM i backups into the IBM COS.  IBM customers are attracted to this capability, as it keeps them in the familiar, and trusted IBM ecosystem.

Generally, the COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for each of us personally and commercially. We have found that teams have been heads-down protecting their employees, developing contingency plans, serving their customers, as well as ensuring that their organization is prepared to weather this storm. To that end, FalconStor has seen significant growth helping organizations deliver remote backup and archive management to help with employee safety while servicing both legacy data challenges and new emerging data requirements.  These three factors are countercyclical to the pandemic's impact and has accelerated our need for highly trained sales professionals.

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