Overland Storage Reaches 1,500 WW Channel Partners in 2011

Base of FastTrack users grew to 4,000

Overland Storage, Inc. announced that in 2011 the number of registered partners participating in the company's FastTrack Program grew from 290 unique partners to more than 1,500 worldwide.  Products range from the Overland NEO Series Tape Libraries, SnapServer NAS DX1 and DX2 Scalable Rackmount Storage, SnapServer SAN Solutions to the REO VTL Virtual Tape Library Solutions.
 
In addition, the base of active FastTrack users grew 10x to over 4,000, driven by benefits including margin protection through deal registration, specialized on-demand training and customizable sales support tools offered to partners.

Overland's FastTrack program gives channel partners access to Overland marketing programs, personalized offline and online resources, as well as an integrated deal registration program that provides margin protection for specific end-user opportunities.

 

Overland's FastTrack program gives channel partners access to Overland marketing programs, personalized offline and online resources, as well as an integrated deal registration program that provides margin protection for specific end-user opportunities.

Additional benefits include:

• Business development funds for lead generation and brand awareness
• Quarterly partner and end-user promotions
• Dedicated field sales, field engineering and inside sales resources

Survey of Overland Storage Channel Partners
Overland Storage also announced the results of a worldwide survey of its sales partners, VARs and solution providers that demonstrates the success of the company's FastTrack Partner Program, as well as the protected margins and promotions to generate sales.

The results of the survey indicate:

• 95% of FastTrack partners say that Overland protected margins are comparable to or better than competitor offerings
• 91% of FastTrack partners report that Overland's partner promotions and protected margins help them sell more
• 89% of FastTrack partners sell Overland Storage because the company distributes its products through the channel only, resulting in significant channel engagement opportunities

"We recognize that VARs are looking to technology vendors for great products from partners they can trust," said Jillian Mansolf, vice president of global sales and marketing at Overland Storage. "The growth of our partners in 2011 and the results of our recent channel survey demonstrate that we are delivering exactly what our partners need to maximize their sales opportunities and profits."

Overland Storage enhances product service and support offerings

Overland Storage, Inc. the trusted global provider of effortless data management and data protection solutions across the data lifecycle, today announced enhanced OverlandCare service offerings for the company’s entire line of SnapServer NAS, SnapSAN, NEO Series tape products and REO Series VTL solutions. Featuring new onsite service and installation options, round-the-clock phone access to solution experts, as well as proof of concept and architectural design offerings, the expanded OverlandCare program strengthens the company’s ability to provide comprehensive technical assistance on a global scale. The enterprise-class components and flexibility of the tiered offering also empower Overland channel partners to easily customize and sell complete service and support solutions to meet customers’ specific needs.

 

Overland’s new centralized global solution call center integrates with its regional solution call center infrastructure across all of the company’s product lines. This network of solution centers provides a framework of support and services designed to enable customers to spend less time managing their infrastructure and focus more on technology innovation to grow their business.

 

Key Benefits of OverlandCare

• Significant investment by Overland Storage in infrastructure and solution call center resources to ensure quick response and one-call resolution for customers
• 24x7x365 global call center technical support now available on all Overland Storage products
• Optional four-hour onsite support now available worldwide on all SnapServer NAS, SnapSAN, NEO Series Tape and REO Series VTL products
• Onsite installation services and support for the entire Overland Storage line of data backup and data protection products
• Proof of concept and architectural design services available for the deployment of complex solutions within customers infrastructure
• Warranty certification delivery system, featuring automatic electronic distribution of warranty certificates and entitlement validation
• Secure service portal, including online product registration and access to services-related information such as the ability to track and log service calls in real time

“Strengthening our services offerings for all Overland Storage products worldwide is an important component of our commitment to making enterprise-class support and services available to companies of all sizes,” said Eric Kelly, CEO of Overland Storage. “Even as the amount of data constantly grows, we believe that the technology to store, manage and protect that data should be easy to buy, easy to deploy and easy to maintain so that companies can focus on their primary business activities. Our enhanced OverlandCare offerings further our ongoing commitment to deliver effortless data protection and data management solutions to the market.”

MOBOTIX CCTV and Overland Storage SnapServer solution stops thefts and vandalism at Saxon church

There are many items of interest in the church including an ancient stone font with a medieval carved wooden cover, six 14th century misericords, a carved reredos dating from 1890, a Victorian organ and a number of stained glass windows. Following a systematic campaign of metal thefts from the church, Paul Drakes, the Churchwarden at St. Nicholas Church felt he had to act: “We had considered CCTV for a while but the property is a grade-one listed building and over a thousand years old, so we needed to be sensitive to the heritage of the site.”

The parish of St. Nicholas, one of the UK’s oldest churches, deployed CCTV technology from MOBOTIX to protect against theft and vandalism while offering access to special services via the internet.

Paul setup a CCTV solution that provides a complete perimeter and internal view of the two acre site with just six cameras. Four of the MOBOTIX DualDome-D12 cameras cover the external perimeter of the building and just two cover the entire interior. This coverage with such a low camera count was achievable because the image quality of the MOBOTIX camera is so good that it can cover a large area whilst retaining good definition.

The system records 30 days worth of footage on an Overland Storage 2TByte SNAP server (snapserver) and is also linked via a BT broadband connection. The MOBOTIX cameras can automatically telephone a range of preset telephone numbers in the event of movement in and around the church, especially late at night when previous incidents have occurred. Recipients of a phone alert can easily and securely log-in via any internet connected PC or mobile device to view footage from any camera in real-time. “This allows us to quickly and safely assess the situation and take the appropriate measures,” explains Paul.

Since the installation of the CCTV, which Paul believes is the first of its kind in the UK to both protect and deliver church services via the internet; there have been no thefts or incidents of vandalism on the site. “Our congregation have taken to it and we are now planning to open the church over a longer period with visitors able to look around or contact us via a telephone with CCTV helping to provide a level of protection when the church is unmanned.”

Enhanced Overland Storage Fastrack Channel Partner Program

Overland Storage, today announced that its FastTrack Partner Program  – established in March 2010 – played a key role in doubling the company’s branded product sales growth over the past year. Moreover, enhancements to the sales enablement program for worldwide channel partners resulted in ten-fold growth of the registered user base and more than tripled deal registrations. The resources and support partners receive through the FastTrack Partner Program greatly increase sales close rates, benefitting both channel partners and Overland Storage.

“With the evolution of Overland’s FastTrack Partner Program, we have been able to take advantage of new lead generation programs, training and sales tools, resulting in a positive effect on our ability to close opportunities with our customers.  In addition, having the security of Overland’s deal registration program makes us more confident that the return on our effort is protected,” said Martin Suzman, vice president of operations at BackupWorks.com.

The FastTrack Partner Program maximizes revenue opportunities and profitability for worldwide channel partners by giving them exclusive access to dedicated Overland sales and marketing programs, personalized offline and online resources, an integrated deal registration program that provides up to 35 percent margin protection for registered sales opportunities, pipeline management and training.

Enhancements to the FastTrack Partner Program in 2011 include:

· Tripling of protected margins on SnapServer rackmount products from 10% to 30%

· Comprehensive profit-maximizing deal registration with automated approvals and tracking

· Improved integrated Overland Partner Portal built on salesforce.com architecture

· Exclusive partner access to new customized resources, content, contests and promotions

· Exclusive access to Overland “PartnerCasts,” a series of educational webinars developed for partners

· Lead generation opportunities and marketing program support

· Dedicated field sales, field engineering and inside sales resources

“The ongoing success of the FastTrack Partner Program has exceeded our expectations,” said Jillian Mansolf, vice president, global sales and marketing, Overland Storage. “We’re continually looking for ways to enhance our programs and listening to our partners and understanding their needs has enabled us to deliver on our commitment to provide the resources and support necessary to help our partners succeed and grow their businesses.”

Overland Storage Appoints Martin Lynch as Vice President of Operations

Overland Storage  announced the appointment of Martin Lynch as vice president of operations. In this position, Lynch will be responsible for the company's strategic and tactical global business operations, including managing end-to-end supply chain and quality for the company.

"We are very pleased to welcome Martin to the Overland executive team to lead the company's global business operations," said Eric Kelly, CEO, Overland Storage. "With over 20 years of experience and a strong background in engineering, Martin will be a great asset as we continue to pursue not only aggressive operating efficiencies but as we develop a product road map that delivers continued value for our customers."

Overland Storage Product lines include both tape and disk solutions such as the SnapServer NAS Solutions, NEO Tape Libraries, and Overland REO VTL products.  The Snap Server brand has seen much success with the recent launch of the SnapServer N2000 NAS a 12 bay 24TB solution with expansion capabilities by adding additional N2000 units or up to 7 E2000 24TB each JBODs.

Previously, Lynch served as executive vice president of operations for 2Wire, Inc., where he built the company's operations department from the ground up. In this role, Lynch was responsible for the company's worldwide supply chain, manufacturing, business operations and end-to-end product life cycle as well as new product introduction. Prior to that, Lynch held several executive operations and engineering roles at enterprise and consumer technology companies, including Cornice Inc., Maxtor Corporation, Coulter Corporation and others. Lynch received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Boston University and holds several patents in disk drive channel optimization code.

Overland's top tech guy: Great things ahead

Barrall talks tape

We had the chance to talk to Geoff Barrall, the founder of BlueArc and Data Robotics, about his work at Overland Storage, where he is charge of product engineering.

He came into Overland after having been his own boss for two decades but "realised that the challenges are very similar and found my feet". CEO Eric Kelly and sales and marketing VP Jillian Mansolf are great to work with, and "I have the right team in place (including some of my old friends from BlueArc and Data Robotics) and everybody is working really well together".

He couldn't discuss the product roadmap in any specific terms at all, but he did say "it's the most exciting I've ever had", and discussed it in a little more detail.

"On the SNAP Server side of the business it's public knowledge that we acquired the Maxiscale scale-out file system which we're excited to integrate and deliver.

Tape market large and growing

"As for tape it's really exciting for me to be working in that area. My Phd is in Cybernetics and so the fact that I'm actually responsible for delivering robotics for a living now ties right back to that. The tape market is large and growing but Overland has work to do to regain its former share.

"Fortunately very little innovation has been applied to this market for some time (by any vendor) and so it's a great area to be creative and I have one of the few teams remaining in the world with the skills to create the necessary technology."

There's a surprise. Tape product engineering developments haven't been switched off. HP, IBM, Quantum, SpectraLogic and other tape product suppliers can look forward to some interesting competition.

"We also introduced two SAN products," said Barrall. "These seem to be doing well and it's exciting to have a product portfolio to work with that spans NAS, SAN, Archive Disk and Tape. Lots of room for synergy there.

Should people be concerned out the length of time it's taking to produce products from his engineering department? "Anybody who knows engineering will know that it take around 18 months to deliver something new and around 24 for something great. I'm working on that kind of time frame and am very excited about 2011 and beyond."

SnapServer 410 Promotion by Overland Storage

Overland Storage today announced a new promotion for this quarter. The promotion relates to the SnapServer 410 series, which is a rackmount Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. The 410 series is available in a 2TB, 3TB, 4TB and now an 8TB platform using 4 drives and can be configured in RAID 5.

The promotion announced today is an excellent saving opportunity for end-users to get 2TB of storage absolutely free. Order a 2TB SnapServer 410 NAS appliance by Overland Storage, and receive a 4TB SnapServer NAS unit instead. Another way of looking at it, would be, you're getting a 4TB SnapServer for the price of a 2TB unit.

The SnapServer 410 by Overland Storage offers a simple, safe, flexible and reliable backup solution. You can centrally manage of of your snapservers,locally or remotely, replicate data to one or multiple snapservers with Enterprise Data Replication software (EDR), snapshots, and maximize data availability and protection with advanced RAID options.

This offer is available now through September 20, 2010. Please contact your BackupWorks representative to find out how you can get 2TB of free storage and have best in class SnapServer NAS storage by Overland Storage. The products at hand are as follows:

SnapServer 410 2TB (part # 5325302029)
SnapServer 410 4TB (part # 5325302223)

Please contact us today at 866 801 2944

Overland Storage - SnapServer Will Move From Milpitas to San Jose

Overland Storage, Inc. has completed plans for a July 2010 move from its Milpitas, California office to a new location in downtown San Jose, California. The newly designed offices in San Jose's Cityview Plaza Towers will accommodate current staff, centralizing the company's sales and marketing organizations, and provide room for expansion to keep pace with planned growth for the organization. Overland's new location offers a modern, open layout created to provide a working environment that fosters creativity and the open exchange of ideas among Overland employees and between Overland's staff and clients.

"Silicon Valley is widely recognized as a center of excellence for the high tech industry. We have carefully selected Overland's new location to take advantage of that reputation and provide our team a great work environment," said Eric Kelly, president and CEO of Overland Storage. "Employees will be within walking distance to countless restaurants, hotels and art and cultural venues. In addition, our team will have walking access to public transportation and new housing options, offering employees efficiencies in their work day travel by facilitating walking, biking and use of public transportation. We recognize that access to travel alternatives not only offers many benefits to our team, but to the community as well, by promoting less stress, cleaner air, reduced consumption of resources and less traffic congestion."

Jonathan Praw, vice president of BPG Properties, the group that owns Cityview Plaza, also pointed to the region's rich history as a high tech pioneer as the reason why companies find San Jose a great place to do business. "Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of high tech workers of any metropolitan area, and downtown San Jose has long been recognized as the Capital of Silicon Valley," said Praw. "As a recent winner of multiple awards recognizing excellence in facilities and building management, we are proud of Cityview Plaza and pleased that Overland Storage has chosen it for their new Silicon Valley location. With onsite retail services, high-end restaurants, a fitness facility and state of the art conference center, Cityview Plaza provides a premiere facility and ideal location for Overland and its employees."

With the announcement of Dr. Geoff Barrall as CTO and vice president of engineering earlier this month, the company will also be combining its product management and product development groups for disk-based data storage at the new location. This will allow Overland to enhance collaboration and accelerate the development of next generation storage technologies.

As part of his employment agreement, Dr. Barrall was granted an inducement stock option for the purchase of up to 218,356 shares of its common stock in accordance with NASDAQ Listing Rule 5635 (c)(4).

Overland's move to the Cityview Plaza Tower location will initially occupy 21,000 square feet of the 159,000 square foot 13-floor tower, with the option to occupy additional space as the company further expands its sales, marketing and engineering efforts. Overland will continue to operate out of its current Milpitas location until July 2010, after which its new Silicon Valley address will be: 125 South Market Street, San Jose, California 95113.

Vendor Metamorphosis, Or Resurrection?

Back in July, I was skeptical that longtime tape automation vendors Tandberg Data and Overland Storage would successfully transit the tempest that is the SMB storage market in the recession. Both are announcing products and road maps that fit their SMB customers better, and Overland has both managed to raise another $12 million and hire Geoff Barrall to be their CTO, which could keep them around long enough to deliver on the vision. MAID pioneer Copan wasn't so lucky, however.

The core of Overland's vision is to make the transition from collecting 80 percent of revenue from HP's OEM tape automation sales to resurrecting the once incredibly valuable SnapServer brand. Their new CEO, Eric Kelly, has an attachment to Snap, having been part of the team that bought it from Quantum for $10 million and sold it to Adaptec for $100 million, now bringing it to Overland for $3 million. As often as Snap's been bought and sold, a guy could make a good living just being their investment banker. Kelly's made some good decisions at Overland, killing off their Ultamus SAN array being at the top of my list.

I had lunch with Eric and Overland's marketing and sales VP Jillian Mansolf a couple of weeks ago, and they get that the keys to the SMB market are making things easy to use and developing channel loyalty. This is, by the way, a model that the pre-Dell Equallogic executed very well.

Now they've added Barrall, who founded BlueArc, which makes high-speed NAS devices. Barrall also founded Data Robotics, which makes the Drobo NAS, and he developed the "Beyond RAID" technology that allows a NAS to use different sized disks in a RAID array. Barrall clearly understands how to make a successful NAS company, so I won't count Overland among the walking wounded just yet.

The new S2000 iSCSI array isn't just a re-package of the iSCSI target Snap servers have had for years. They've re-written both the iSCSI target to make it faster, and the user interface, replacing the web GUI with Windows plug-ins that greatly simplify provisioning. They've also added a vCenter plugin and high availability for VMware via replication and failover. With SAS and SATA options and expandability to 120TB via SAS JBODs, S2000 is competitive with other entry-level SAN arrays like HP's MSA and Dell Equallogic and is probably a step up form EMC's AX.