How Climb Channel Solutions and Cloudian are working together to help channel partners address opportunities in AI and hybrid cloud
Climb Channel Solutions is a fast- growing US distributor with big ambitions for the UK and EMEA, following its acquisitions of Sigma Software Distribution in 2020, Spinnakar in 2022 and DataSolutions last October.
Specialising in emerging tech, primarily in the datacentre, infrastructure and cybersecurity sectors, Climb’s global revenues hit $1.26 billion in 2023, up from about $300 million four years ago.
According to Chief Revenue Officer Gerard Brophy, this makes Climb big enough to give vendors the scale they need, but small enough to make decisions very quickly.
“We are very much a people business and our resellers and vendors like dealing with us because we just get stuff done. Ultimately, what we’re about is speed to market. Our vendors want to be in front of the customers as soon as possible, so that’s the service we offer. From quoting and invoicing to delivery, speed is everything. I see us as more of a sales and marketing business than a distribution business.”
He adds that channel gives emerging vendors scale and an extended salesforce, plus the support infrastructure, professional services and training that a distributor like Climb provides to help them establish a market presence and grow more quickly.
“We like to take vendors early and act as a proxy, taking their technology to market and creating their footprint. Compared to the broadline model, where it seems to me that everyone’s fighting over the same deals, we’re always looking ahead. We’re always evangelising. What’s the next best thing that’s going to come out of Silicon Valley? That’s why resellers want to work with us.”
Reciprocal value
One Climb vendor that Brophy holds up as an example of a company that understands the reciprocal value of channel relationships is Cloudian, a specialist in S3-compatible object storage systems founded in 2011 to help enterprises address the cost and complexity of data storage at a time of massive growth in unstructured data and data gravity, where applications move to where the data resides to ensure performance and security.
It does this by bringing the scale and affordability of cloud-native storage technology to enterprise data centres, where it can be controlled and secured in on-prem and hybrid cloud deployments running on industry-standard servers or Cloudian appliances.
Cloudian’s two building blocks are:
a highly scalable HyperStore platform, which joins together nodes in multiple locations, data centres and geographies to form a cluster that can be scaled to exabyte size and managed as a single system, with a 70% lower TCO than conventional storage systems; and
fully native interoperability with the Amazon S3 API, the de facto standard in S3 object storage used by thousands of applications from the likes of Adobe, Commvault, Microsoft SQL, Rubrik, Snowflake, Splunk, Teradata, Veeam, Veritas and many others.
“At the scale data is being created you really need a modern API that’s designed for scale of exabytes of data and this is why we focus as a company on the Amazon S3 API. It really is the most well-defined set of APIs or protocols to handle very large data sets,” explains Cloudian CEO and co-founder Michael Tso.
“We have taken whatever Amazon offers with the S3 API and built it for a fully distributed world, for on-prem and for hybrid, and kept it compatible at every single level so that we can promise that if you have something that runs in the cloud, it can run on our data storage without any modifications to your application.”
Ahead of its time
Tso adds that when Cloudian started in 2011 it was probably ahead of its time, with its vision of a distributed rather than centralised future.
“For a number of years, we were against the grain, because everybody was saying everything’s going to be centralised in the cloud and all IT outside the cloud is going to disappear. What we’re seeing now is that not only has IT outside of cloud not shrunk, but it’s growing faster again, because of the AI push.
“AI is going to be done near where you have the data and, because people are very concerned about the security of the data and what AI is being trained on, we’re seeing that even the hyperscalers, the public cloud guys, are now pushing a hybrid edge strategy.”
At the same time, many businesses are looking to de-cloud to some extent to tackle public cloud’s perceived shortcomings in cost, transparency, performance and data sovereignty, especially in countries with laws to counter the Patriot Act, which enables the US government to look at the data an organisation might have on a US-owned and managed platform.
“For CIOs to say they are ‘cloud-first’ now sounds very old hat. Today it’s about right-clouding – what’s right to put in the cloud. We did a call blitz with one of our major strategic partners recently and they generated over 30 opportunities in just a couple of days. And 100% of those deals were cloud repatriation deals,” explains Tso.
He adds that this is generating significant interest for Cloudian on the HPE Greenlake platform from customers that still want a very cloud-like experience including MSPs that use the multi-tenancy Cloudian platform to provide storage-as-a- service to their customers.
“People want something that looks and smells like cloud, with a consumption payment model, so they’re not buying CapEx; they’re looking for something that’s elastic, meaning that if their workload is growing the hardware is put in before they even need it, and without having to place a separate order. And then having the option to have everything managed so that it feels like a true cloud experience, except that it’s got that data sovereignty.”
Complementary solution
Cloudian also has a key strategic partnership with Amazon, offering a complementary solution for customers that require a hybrid solution, for example where there is a data sovereignty issue or where connectivity to the cloud might be unreliable, weak, or with high latency.
“The further you are from the core, the more shakey and the more expensive that link becomes. A supermarket chain might have a couple of Cloudian storage nodes in every store for local data processing. They cannot count on storage in the cloud because it’s too far away, the latency is too high. We have clients that like the Amazon ecosystem, or they have applications that work in the Amazon ecosystem, but they need the storage to be some place they can control. In the UK, for example, Public Health England stores all health records on Cloudian. In the US, the National Institute of Health does the same kind of thing. We also have a bunch of defence/ military clients and a lot of banks. Credit card companies are doing real time transaction authorisation with massive systems that are running on our data. It’s not easy to do these things in a shared cloud and give the same assurances of latency and privacy.
“Wherever people are looking for anything hybrid or to take data out of the cloud, it is better for their data to move to Cloudian because we are fully complementary to the cloud and can easily move that data back into the cloud in the future. Amazon has edge solutions like Amazon Outposts that connect to Cloudian storage. In fact, we’re listed on the Amazon Marketplace so the Amazon salesperson will get comped whether they’re selling data in AWS S3 or on Cloudian.”
As examples of how Cloudian is supporting Amazon’s own AI and hybrid edge initiatives and integrating with AI workflows, Tso cites a trio of recent launches, including
Cloudian S3 Bucket Migrator, which enables businesses to migrate data from Cloudian S3 storage into and out of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new rapid access service for frequently accessed and latency-sensitive applications;
Open source contributions to the S3 for the PyTorch suite of tools favoured by AI engineers, which enable deep learning and machine learning libraries to pull data directly out of a Cloudian S3 object store instead of having to move large volumes of data to a parallel file system; and
Integration with Mountpoint for Amazon S3, an open source file client created by Amazon that enables customers to mount a Cloudian S3 bucket on their compute instance and access it as a local file system.
Huge opportunity
In light of these developments, it’s not surprising that Gerard Brophy describes the opportunity ahead with Cloudian in the UK and EMEA as ‘huge’.
For the last three years, Climb (and Spinnakar) have been leading with Cloudian’s capabilities in ransomware protection, backup, disaster recovery and immutability, drawing on its alliances with companies like Veeam, Veritas and Rubrik to offer customers end-to-end solutions. This is still a successful approach, and a good opportunity for resellers/MSPs to ‘land and expand’ with Cloudian.
However, in the future Brophy sees great value in leading with discussions around a customer’s data strategy and AI strategy, which he believes plays to the strengths of Cloudian’s hybrid cloud offering and Climb’s broad ecosystem of products.
“Gone are the days when you would walk into a reseller and try to sell them another product. Today, we are more interested in finding out about a reseller’s data approach and AI strategy. From that, we can build up a story and then push the products in our ecosystem that align with that story. That’s the way we’re going to sell – it’s solutions-led and it’s a consultative approach, not do you want to buy that product?”He says that Climb can also help resellers move to the managed services model that the market is crying out for.
“From a channel point of view, that’s certainly where we see the growth. To see where the opportunity for the channel is, you just have to look at the lack of skills out there. It’s no surprise that everyone is turning into MSPs. Apart from anything else, you’re going to get a much higher valuation of your business selling an ARR subscription model.”
Climb can help partners manage this transition through education, through
the provision of its own marketplace (Expedition) and by working with the right partners, including vendors like Cloudian, which, as Tso points out, has a large number of MSP partners.
“We have over 800 customers worldwide, and that includes over 250 managed service providers, ranging from big ones like NTT, serving thousands or hundreds of thousands of enterprises, to smaller ones with just a few people. That is how we capture the long tail of companies that don’t have the knowhow to go into cloud on their own or to buy something and manage it on their own.”
He adds that unlike some storage products Cloudian is inherently ‘service provider-friendly’.
“Because we built our ‘as a service’ offering initially for NTT, which provides services to the whole world, we have all these security features for billing and privacy control. Everything is turnkey, all the features are already there, so it’s a very easy sell for us and very good fit for MSPs.”
To find out more about Climb and Cloudian, please visit www.climbcs.com/ uk/vendors/cloudian or call 01364 655 200.
