Unitrends Drives High-Velocity Channel Growth Through Viral UniRewards Program

COLUMBIA, S.C., Feb. 11, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Unitrends, the leading provider of all-in-one backup, archiving, instant recovery and disaster recovery solutions, today announced the launch of UniRewards, a new loyalty program for Unitrends' channel partners and resellers designed to incentivize every step of the sales process. Piloted with select partners since October 2012, UniRewards has already garnered nearly 1,700 active members. The rewards program is now available to Unitrends' entire partner ecosystem of more than 500 organizations worldwide.

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Click to Tweet: Join @Unitrends_Inc's new UniRewards #channel program and earn cash rewards for selling #Unitrends #backup products! www.unirewards.com

"Unitrends provides tremendous value to our customers," said Douglas Nofziger, senior account executive, Sonit Systems. "The company's all-in-one backup and recovery solutions give our customers the flexibility to continually evolve their data centers and still trust that their data is protected on-premise, on virtualized systems and in the cloud. And they are affordable and easy to deploy and manage. Partnering with Unitrends has enabled us to grow our business, and, more importantly, to help our customers sleep at night knowing data protection is one less thing they have to worry about. The fact that our reps can now collect UniRewards is an added bonus that makes an already fantastic synergy even stronger."

Through UniRewards, partners can earn points for engaging in various activities that support Unitrends' products and services, such as inviting other sales reps to join the program, registering a qualified lead or registering a closed deal. Members can then redeem their reward points for cash that is loaded onto a personalized, reloadable UniRewards Bancorp Visa^® debit card. Affiliate gift cards from Amazon.com^® and Travelocity^® are also available. Members can quickly and easily register for and redeem points through the UniRewards portal. The platform also provides partners with:

• A 48-hour turnaround time for approvals on deal registrations.
• Minimum 180-day margin protection for registered deals.
• Sales chat and live platform help during the business hours of 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. ET.
• An overall service level agreement (SLA) response time of less than 24 business hours.
• A 10 business day SLA for payout of reward points.
• Quarterly incentives to earn extra rewards.
• Online training and curriculum for sales, pre-sales and support representatives, with new curriculum scheduled to debut later this month.
• Ready-to-use marketing toolkits and co-branded materials.

"UniRewards has been a great bonus incentive for us to sell more," said Craig Petronella, president,  Petronella Computer Consultants, Inc. "We highly recommend Unitrends as a proven backup and disaster recovery solution to our clients, and the added bonus of a points system is a fantastic idea that has helped us place Unitrends above all competitors. It's nice to have a vendor and partner that truly wants to help its channel partners in every way possible."

Unrivaled Technology and Support Accelerate Channel Growth
Unitrends recently reported 2012 as the best year in the company's history, and the same holds true for the channel program. Highlights include:

• 104 percent growth in channel sales, 2012 over 2011.
• 198 percent growth in new value-added reseller (VAR) accounts, 2012 over 2011, with 200 net new accounts signed. Unitrends' partner ecosystem now consists of more than 500 organizations worldwide.
• 100 percent growth in channel staff within Unitrends, 2012 over 2011, and 154 percent growth in the number of channel representatives supporting the company.
• Nearly 1,700 UniRewards members since the pilot program launched in October 2012.
• Recent industry recognition by Business Solutions, which named Unitrends one of the best backup and disaster recovery channel vendors for 2013.

Driving the channel program's success is the company's commitment to delivering simple, affordable and best-in-class data protection solutions for heterogeneous environments, unrivaled customer support that strives for a satisfaction rating of 98 percent or greater, and procedures that make it easy for channel partners to do business with Unitrends.

"Our mission has always been to provide our channel ecosystem with technology they feel confident selling, support and service they trust, and a true partner that's easy to work with," said Bob Gagnon, vice president of channel sales, Unitrends. "We want our partners to know that we are committed to their success, just as they are a crucial part of ours. UniRewards was designed to give back to the companies that take care of us on a daily basis."

For more information on or to sign up for the UniRewards program, please visit www.unirewards.com.

About Unitrends
The trusted provider of all-in-one backup solutions, Unitrends enables its customers to focus on their business instead of backup. The company's family of scalable, all-in-one appliances and software solutions for backup, archiving, instant recovery and disaster recovery protects corporate data, over 100 different versions of servers, operating systems (including Windows, Hyper-V, VMware, Mac OS, Linux, AIX, Solaris and many others), SAN, NAS, hypervisors (including Hyper-V and VMware) and applications (including Exchange, SQL, Oracle and many others).  Unitrends is the preferred choice of IT professionals because the company sets the standard in virtual, physical and cloud server data protection with instant recovery that enables complete system recovery in less than five minutes while Unitrends' pricing offers the lowest TCO in the industry. Unitrends' U.S.-based support team boasts a 99% customer satisfaction rate. Visit www.unitrends.com.    

Media Contact:
Jackie Gerbus for Unitrends, Inc.
[email protected]
803-454-0300

SOURCE Unitrends