Key Highlights
- Cloud storage provider Backblaze has majorly enhanced its channel program with the ability to reserve capacity in advance to ease sales of partners, along with a promise to not charge any fees beyond the capacity cost used by its channel customers.
- Nilay Patel, Vice President of sales and partners of Backblaze, said that the changes to the channel program also include a new partner portal to let partners register deals and better track the results of that registration further.
Backblaze has grown from a focus on offering direct cloud-based data protection for individuals to working with small businesses to enterprises. It made the channel a central part of its strategy during the process.
He said they are backing up over a half-million customers in 70 countries and are managing about three exabytes of capacity. Backblaze is easy to use, affordable, and S3-compatible. Backblaze wants to make it even easier to use and affordable with the changes it makes to its channel program.
The first major change is an update to Backblaze B2 Reserve. The company unveiled a pricing package in April that gives its channel partners the ability to buy storage capacity predictably rather than based on strict consumption.
With Backblaze B2 Reserve, channel partners can commit to capacity purchases up-front with a discount and then offer them to customers as part of a package of services with predictable pricing.
Backblaze B2 Reserve drives cloud storage 100 percent predictable. There are no hidden fees. Usually, the fees for egress, retention, retrieval, or transactions can cost two to eight times what customers anticipate. Now they have eliminated all those fees, so customers pay no more than the storage capacity they buy.
The Backblaze B2 Reserve program permits channel partners to set up a budget for what they pay for cloud storage over time while allowing it to pay for what they require.
