GroundWork building on Quru signing with campaign to recruit additional partners
GroundWork, an open platform for unified monitoring for IT operations management, virtualisation and cloud monitoring, says it plans to build on its first UK partner signing with channel recruitment campaign across Europe.
In April the San Francisco-based vendor announced it had signed up open source technology integrator and fellow Red Hat partner Quru to help expand its presence in the UK market.
Roland Whitehead, CEO at Quru said the two firm’s common understanding of Red Hat technology, which is embedded in GroundWork’s unified monitoring platform, “will create useful synergies in terms of delivering additional implementation and integration services to our clients.”
Now, the firm is looking to add to its roster of partners. Explains David Dennis, VP of marketing and business development at GroundWork: “We expect to expand our partner network over the next year and we are definitely looking to grow more in Europe. Our primary markets here are the UK, Germany and Switzerland.”
He adds: “We are looking for solution integrators with familiarity with enterprise IT and open source technologies. What’s important for us is the ability to establish long term relationships with our partners and to build on existing technology expertise to help end customers address their key IT challenges,” he says, adding that due to the open nature of the product, “there are ample opportunities for additional service revenue from customisation.”
Globally, 30-35 percent of GroundWork’s sales go through partners, but outside of North America, 100 percent of the business goes through local partners. At present the vendor doesn’t go through distribution, but Dennis concedes that “we are open to changing this business model should the right business opportunity arise.”
Dennis also says GroundWork is planning to continue to drive organic growth through its freemium model which allows end users to download its software for free and enables the firm to monetise downloads by charging for value added features and services.
GroundWork argues that traditional approaches for managing complex and heavily virtualised IT environments are often costly and rarely provide in-depth detail and visibility into IT systems and applications. It claims its technology enables integrated monitoring of all IT environments, including cloud, virtualisation, network, application, server and storage data.
“According to Gartner, using a large and mixed tool portfolio and traditional practices to manage today’s environmental realities is often costly and rarely provides the needed breadth and depth of visibility,” says Dennis.
“Our technology effectively addresses these challenges by providing a unified monitoring platform, delivered in the cloud, that enables businesses to easily monitor all IT environments without adding more complexity and extra costs to existing IT infrastructure.”
Source: Channel Pro