Hayden Sadler, Infinidat country manager for South Africa.

Data storage company Infinidat is leveraging its channel partner ecosystem to expand across the African continent.

This was revealed by Hayden Sadler, Infinidat country manager for South Africa, in an e-mail interview with ITWeb.

Infinidat was founded in 2011 as a global organisation and has had a presence in South Africa for the past six years.

Sadler says besides the African expansion plans, the company is witnessing brisk business within SA, especially on the data centre front.

“We are seeing significant growth opportunities in South Africa. We are cementing our value for South African businesses and highlighting our presence by having secured blue-chip customers, such as Clientele Life, Senwes, Silicon Sky and Vox Telecom.

“Our strategic channel partners play a key role in our growth strategy and we are committed to growing this area of our ecosystem. We are perpetually investing in them and empowering our partners to develop their skills in our solutions.

“We are leveraging our channel partners to expand our presence and establish a customer base in the rest of Africa. Our goal is to empower local partners in their respective countries and provide them with new opportunities in order to expand our business in the region.”

According to Sadler, Infinidat’s focus for South Africa is to assist businesses that generate large volumes of data to store, protect and scale agilely with on-premises storage that demonstrates low total cost of ownership and a flexible “pay-as-you-grow” pricing model. He explains that the latter helps companies manage unpredictable data requirements with a predictable cost.

“We have made great strides in the local market, delivering storage that doesn’t compromise performance, scalability and cost. The channel forms an important component of our ‘go-to-market’ strategy, and as such, we have established channel partners in South Africa that we work closely with, acting as our extended team.”

The company recently launched an accreditation programme to help equip and advance its channel partners with multiple educational tracks. It is an expansion of the company’s online training options, Sadler says.

“This reflects our long-term strategic commitment to the channel and will help improve the ability of partners to address the evolving and complex needs of enterprise customers with Infinidat’s data storage solutions.”

Sadler believes there is a significant requirement for storage at scale in South Africa, in industries such as telecoms, financial services and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

The establishment of data centres in SA is also creating opportunities for Infinidat, along with the increasing requirement for IaaS, says Sadler.

“A perfect example of this is Vox Telecom and Silicon Sky that make use of our InfiniBox enterprise storage array that delivers on-premises, high-performance, high-availability and multi-petabyte capacity for mixed application workloads.”

He adds that the establishment of data centres in SA brings with them other “as-a-service” offerings, such as backup-as-a-service, with storage at the core of this offering.

“We are able to offer these service providers the critical storage infrastructure that can rapidly scale without compromising reliability and performance. We work with both on-premises and cloud environments. We collaborate with cloud providers and offer the storage or information management component, which is cloud-neutral, along with an easy cloud migration path. Our goal is to collaborate with cloud providers and simplify storage for customers.”