Vembu Blog » Partner Zone

Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Vendor, but What Your Vendor Can Do For You

mitch — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:08:57 +0000

Too often vendors have long and onerous requirements for their partners to “qualify” to them to sell their solutions. While I agree that it makes sense to set expectations between vendors and partners, vendors need to appreciate that partners are the feet on the street whose reputation is at stake every time they propose a solution to their customer. As Lenin mentioned in his last post, commitment to the channel is of paramount importance for any MSP or MHP because nothing causes more heartache than a vendor who ends up competing with their partners from time to time.

Beyond building a great technology platform, arguably the most impactful thing a vendor can do for his partners is to provide leads. As vendors implement broad marketing initiatives, they are invariably going to drive traffic from both partners and end users. How does a vendor capture this end user traffic and what does it do with it?

At Vembu, we now have link on our home page titled “Looking For Service Providers” which links to a form that helps end users connect with a service provider. If you have not already seen it, please check out the following link:

Looking for a Service Provider

The intent of this form is to gather leads from customers looking for help protecting their data and then to distribute those leads to our Service Provider partners quickly. Vembu will distribute these leads based on interacting with our partners and understanding which MSPs are best suited to respond to the lead based on geographic location and technical capability. Vembu is committed to helping our MSPs succeed. This is why we build and execute our roadmap based on partner input and why we want to help drive the successful services business with our partners.

The above post was written by Mitchell Cipriano of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities worldwide.

Vembu Pro Online Backup Service allows Value Added Resellers and Managed Service Providers to offer online backup service to their customers without worrying about storage or hardware infrastructure.

New Partner Zone look – inspired by Bing

lux — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:45:25 +0000

Over 1,300 online backup service providers use our partner zone. If you’re one of them and have been to the partner zone lately, you probably noticed that it looks different.

If you like the new look, remember to thank Bing!

One of the interesting things that’s helping endear Bing to its users is their interesting library of background images. Take a look – most of those pics are amazing (hint: there’s a control at the bottom right that lets you see other pictures) !

Bing’s homepage design is the polar opposite of Google’s spartan approach to homepage design, but Bing seems to be winning some hearts, minds and…searches!

Coming back to the Vembu StoreGrid partner zone…

If you joined the party recently, here’s what it used to look like:

How did we ever approve that!!!

This is what it looks like now:

Look out for other interesting images in months to come. We’ll do all we can to make your Partner Zone experience a pleasant one!

The above post was written by Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Forget with Confidence, Edit on demand

lux — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:29:36 +0000

At times, I’m a ‘to do list’ freak!

I’ve even been guilty of writing up ‘to do lists’ consisting of tasks, some of which have already been completed – simply so that I can have the juvenile pleasure of ticking them as soon as I write them!

However, nothing beats the pleasure of ‘ticking off’ tasks that have been languishing in a to do list for far longer than you’d care to remember. We had the opportunity to do this earlier this week – with one of the (many) to do lists for the Vembu StoreGrid Online Backup Partner Zone…

You can now afford to Forget Your Password!

Everyday, we get up to 3 emails from partners who have forgotten their Partner Zone login name/password!

The (long pending) forgot your password feature is now up and allows you to immediately change your password, if required.

What’s more, we’ll also email you details on other members from your firm who are using the same partner zone account – so you can be nice, and let them know that they need to remember another obscure password!

The bigger piece of news: You can now Edit Build-O-Matic on Demand!

For various reasons, we’ve (so far) been ‘manually throttling’ the custom build creation process. As many of you know, each time you needed to make an edit to your custom build or create a new custom build – you needed to email us to get your form back to ‘edit’ mode. In fact, we get an average of two such requests every day – to set the form back into edit mode!

You can now do this yourself, i.e., set your form back to edit mode, as required!

Although the post title says ‘Edit on Demand’, please use your discretion when requesting new builds. We don’t have a formal cap on the number of edits you can do but since it ‘costs us’ a fair amount of bandwidth and storage each time Build-O-Matic churns out a new set of builds, we request you to be judicious about requesting new builds – that way, we’ll (hopefully) never need to place a cap on how many edits partners do.

Partners who have never forgoten their passwords and/or never edited their build settings probably won’t perceive these features to be even mildly interesting. I’m sure the others are probably cursing us for not introducing this earlier!