Violin Memory and Skyera Lead in Branded Channel Adoption among SSD/Flash Storage Companies

REDMOND, Wash., Oct 15, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Customers are rapidly adopting flash memory-based storage products, including their SAN and appliance implementations, for high-performance application environments at the expense of existing major storage platform vendors. While revenue has been growing steadily through direct sales, many vendors are engaging with the channel and gaining traction among the core partners for traditional storage platform vendors.

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In this Partner InSite report, The Spur Group compares the channels for five core storage platform vendors: EMC (EMC), NetApp (NETA), Oracle (ORCL) and Dell (DELL) against the channel efforts of leading SSD/flash storage suppliers, including Fusion-io (FIO), X-IO, Violin Memory (VMEM), Skyera, Whiptail and others. The Partner InSite report, Share of Partner Voice: Storage and SSD, measures Share of Partner Voice®, a proprietary measure of how partner marketing supports the branded product marketing efforts of technology vendors.

The report explores the unbranded service offerings related to storage services across the partner channel, identifying partners who offer advanced storage services, such as virtualizing storage or architecting high-availability/high-performance storage systems for customers.

The Partner InSite report is broken into 12 regions across the U.S., and contains more than 50 pages of detailed information on which partners are most relevant to the storage market, which vendors are gaining traction in the channel as branded offerings and which partners are leading the market for enterprise storage solutions. The report discovered significant inroads into the major storage platform vendors, with an average of more than 20 percent of their partners adopting SSD/flash technology from largely new entrants into the market as a branded part of their offerings, at the expense of the incumbent storage platform vendors, including EMC, NetApp, Dell and Oracle.

Ross Brown, senior principal and the lead author of the report, said flash-based solutions are gaining traction in the channel.

"Given the rapid growth in flash-based storage, these new companies are moving beyond opportunistic reselling and into branded offerings, a deep level of commitment to partnering," Brown said.

"Our approach to measuring Share of Partner Voice® shows that Violin Memory is outpacing the market, with more than twice the brand presence of its nearest competitor," Brown said. "The report also highlights why the market for acquiring these companies is accelerating, as the channel adoption is happening very quickly and often at the expense of incumbent platforms."

Partner InSite reports are designed for sales and channel managers identifying partners that will yield the highest recruitment return, for product managers seeking to understand competitive adoption and for financial and industry analysts looking to forecast trends by measuring channel partner adoption.

The report is offered as a standalone report or as an annual subscription with trend lines on the adoption data released quarterly. To purchase this Partner InSite report visit thespurgroup.com/landing/state-ssd-market/.

About Partner InSite:

Partner InSite is a proprietary research methodology created by The Spur Group that measures Share of Partner Voice® across the entire U.S. partner channel. This is accomplished by crawling all the visible text of partner websites and conducting a semantic analysis on how partners describe their business to customers, measuring the vendor products and brands, services and vertical industries they focus on. From this, it's possible to derive the force multiplier effect that vendor sales and marketing efforts get out of the marketing and brand extension work of the broad partner channel.

About The Spur Group:

The Spur Group is a leading Revenue-Side Consulting® firm that works with technology companies and suppliers on sales, marketing and channel innovations. Based in Redmond, Wash., The Spur Group works with a broad array of technology companies, including VMware, Microsoft, Google, Cisco and many others. You can reach The Spur Group at thespurgroup.com or 425-885-0684.

Sector: Storage

SOURCE The Spur Group