Sun sale: Pillar checks itself

Don't call us resellers

Piller is altering the emphasis of its channel program so that its storage is a component of a system, such as a business intelligence or disaster recovery; Maness envisaging, for example, a BI-led sale with Pillar storage integrated inside it.

The channel partner sells into a vertical application market. "Don't use the word reseller. It denotes someone who hawks boxes. No - our partners sell solutions containing our product."

The channel program is changing away from having lots of partners to one having fewer selected partners in a region. Maness said Pillar was looking for higher value partners now. Pillar is minimising the numbers of authorised reseller partners per region to mitigate unnecessary competition. Its channel partners will also be able to sell and carry out Pillar Professional Services, increasing the value of sales. They will also have the ability to match competitive pricing, as well as enjoying volume-based pricing discounts.

There are also other partner offerings like a seminar-in-a-box to help their lead generation activities.

All this leaves the impresssion that Pillar is weathering the recession well, with new customer numbers growing at a steady rate. Pillar has no great inside track insight into Oracle's intentions with Sun but does see opportunities in the Sun technology stack.

The Axiom arrays are getting a three-step flash memory roadmap considered, along with the use of Sun's ZFS file system technology. That, with its software RAID and scalability features, could provide interesting extensions to the Axiom's software environment.

The ideas of SSD tiering is a novel one, and it seems that Pillar may have the most detailed insight and plans into how flash memory can be used in storage arrays of all the storage vendors. ®