M+E Daily

As organizations increasingly adopt cloud storage solutions, value-added resellers (VARs) and managed service providers (MSPs) are being confronted with the challenge of meeting customer expectations while consistently delivering added value, Wasabi Technologies said June 29, during the webinar “Wasabi: How to Leverage Its Hot Cloud Storage to Scale Your Cloud Storage Business.”

Wasabi says its hot cloud storage acts as the “easy button” for VARs and MSPs looking to expand their offerings. Meanwhile, with Wasabi Account Control Manager, VARs and MSPs gain granular control over pricing, permissions and more, according to the company.

During the webinar, Wasabi and one of its partners, Whalley Computer Associates (WCA), explored how WCA leverages Wasabi hot cloud storage and the transformative capabilities of Wasabi Account Control Manager to maximize customer value and drive scalable growth for their cloud storage business.

Included in the webinar were: a deep dive into the value realized by WCA via reselling Wasabi and how they’re using Wasabi Account Control Manager, how Wasabi makes it easy for VARs and MSPs to add new revenue streams through cloud storage; the versatility of Wasabi for various IT use cases, including cloud backups and the integrations that Wasabi has now with more than 350 alliance partners.

David Boland, VP, cloud strategy at Wasabi, noted that he’s “responsible for looking at new and exciting use cases, understand what our technical ads partners do, and get an idea of what to expect three, five, seven years down the road.”

WCA, meanwhile, is entering its 44^th year in business, Michael T. Sheil, its president, said, noting he had the title since June 20, 2020.

That was “right in the middle of Covid and other issue but, through it all, we’ve grown and we’ve had some great success as far as that goes,” he said, adding: “We are a provider of all things technology, from security to cloud offerings to client and data center,” he noted. “We’re excited about the now but we’re really excited about our future as we continue to grow. “

Laura Ziton, senior channel account manager at Wasabi, asked Sheil how Wally got into the cloud business.

He responded: “Really just evolving again with technology but also with our vendor partners. And, as Bill will attest, being a former customer of ours and now an employee, he saw that and we listened to our customers and we kind of grew as they grew in the cloud.” He was referring to Bill Suarez, Wally’s chief information security officer (CISO)

Sheil added: “We’re expanding on that, as we see more and more, both with the public and the private cloud continuing to be offered.”

Suarez was quick to point out: “You really need to understand what problems you’re trying to solve to find out whether the cloud is really a solution…. If you’re looking to move an entire compute organization, it’s a large undertaking. And the technology to perform the compute is one part of it.”

Suarez added: “Security is an even greater challenge. But in many of the cases, what we need is we need a purpose-built solution like Wasabi for storage. They just need to have someplace secure to put their data. And that comes from pressure from internally, knowing that they need to have copies of their data somewhere that are safe.”