Key Highlights
- The storage industry is full of cloud storage providers, each trying to carve out its niche in a market characterized by commoditized offerings and ever-lower prices.
- It features an eclectic mix of mature companies and hot startups, with some concentrated on providing just the raw storage.
- In contrast, others offer various services, including storage-related services such as data backups and archiving and some non-storage-related services.
One of those vendors is Idrive, and a Calabasas, California-based company founded approximately 30 years ago as a provider of raw storage capacity and data protection. Idrive, which also provides a remote PC access technology called RemotePC, started providing raw cloud storage compatible with the ubiquitous Amazon Web Services S3 object storage protocol this spring.
While Idrive has grown mainly by offering its technology direct to end users, the company has a small but increasing indirect channel partner base. And with the introduction of its S3-compatible object storage service, that indirect focus is increasing, said CEO Raghu Kulkarni.
He said that partners could manage their users’ storage with full control of privacy and security. They can let end users have all the security controls, or they can manage things completely for their end users for ease of use. They can choose whichever approach they want based on their use cases.
While Idrive e2 object storage, like all Idrive products, is available directly to consumers, Kulkarni said the company incentivizes partners to bring it to customers as part of their service bundles.
He said that partners offer not just plain S3-compatible storage but also applications such as Veeam or Veritas, or others that work with S3-compatible storage behind the scenes. When they provide customer service, it’s usually a bundled service. And they can substantially have their margins on top of what they pay.
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