Local off-site media storage specialist, Backup Storage Facilities (BSF), recently announced the availability of its suite of products to resellers. This follows the established trend in the ICT industry where shared resellers are an integral part of a sales strategy.
The institution of this programme creates new market opportunities for resellers and gives BSF access to clients via well-established relationships, while putting commissions and annuity-based revenue into the pockets of the reseller.
Annetta Holmes, CEO of BSF, states: "We want to be a business partner to all of our resellers and embarked on this programme in order to encourage small and medium IT companies to take advantage of the BSF services - both our usual off-site media storage offering and that of the e-storage facility.
"This focus ensures we maintain and extend our leadership through strong relationships, while reseller partners are rewarded for their sales through increased profitability.
"Every company has critical assets - those that have a direct and significant impact on corporate performance. Our tenure in the off-site media storage business is what has created competitive advantage for us, and strengthens our offering to the channel."
How it works
Growing interest from the field encouraged the creation of a specific agreement to preside over the interests of BSF and the reseller, while also protecting the end-user. At present, a number of active resellers are already enjoying their relationship with BSF and a high level of interest has been shown from a range of others, including networking companies, technical support services and hardware suppliers.
In fact, any company that interacts with the IT structures or personnel within any sized company can benefit from this programme. The structure of the relationship with the reseller is categorised dependant on the size of their clients and the nature of their relationship with them as well as what they require from BSF.
Service level agreements protect BSF, reseller partners and clients. A high emphasis is also placed on confidentiality. Newly appointed national sales manager, Carol Hogarth, is tasked with promoting these relationships and supporting channel requests with constant communication and sustaining impeccable service backup.
Already on the collaborative team are resellers Sungard and Intelligent Solutions, where referral business is reciprocal and cross-promotion is currently bearing fruit. Both these resellers are actively promoting BSF`s services via promotional material and word-of-mouth, and BSF is doing the same.
June Welthagen, newly appointed Acting General Manager at BSF, added: "We also currently enjoy relationships with some of the larger outsourcing entities including arivia.kom. As IT outsourcing is a firmly established and accepted manner of managing IT departments, this is an obvious opportunity for us to expand our relationships into the outsourcing industry and thereby reach their client bases."
BSF`s online data backup offering, e-Storage DIRECT (e-SD) is also in a position to take care of technical installation and sales support for clients of resellers. Those partners eager to deliver results for their customers will be working in a flexible environment where they will not be left vulnerable or be blamed for unresponsiveness. BSF`s understanding of how important it is to provide excellent service in order for customers to view resellers as effective, will protect resellers and affiliates.
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