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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