Ormuco, a provider of a hybrid cloud platform built on OpenStack and a close collaborator with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is launching a push into the channel with its first formal partner program and the hire of an IT industry veteran as its channel chief.
Maria Dinallo, formerly the senior director of channel sales at desktop virtualization specialist Parallels, has joined Ormuco as senior channel director to head the company's partner program.
The Montreal-based company provides the Ormuco Stack, a software platform that is especially relevant for customers that are looking to build an on-premise private cloud, said Jeff Smith, vice president of business development at Ormuco partner International Integrated Solutions (IIS).
The Ormuco Stack provides "an AWS-like experience" on-premises by combining the feature set of OpenStack with functions that Ormuco has developed for federation, control, visibility, and multitenancy, Smith said. The software is built around a core of OpenStack, Docker, and Kubernetes, and is sold as a monthly per-server subscription.
In an increasingly hybrid IT world, "a lot of enterprises want to have a private cloud with a rich set of features that their users can currently get from the public cloud, but with IT controls to manage it," Smith said.
IIS, a top HPE partner based in Plainview, New York, began partnering with Ormuco this past spring and closed the first joint customer deal over the summer, according to Smith.
The partnership with Ormuco made sense in part because the vendor has been tailoring its solutions to work with HPE offerings, he said. The Ormuco Stack was initially geared toward use with HPE Helion – which HPE sold to SUSE [4] a year ago – and the software now runs on the HPE Synergy composable infrastructure platform.
Among the advantages for partners in the collaboration between Ormuco and HPE is the ability to transmit workloads from Ormuco Stack deployments to managed clouds that are part of Cloud28+, a community of managed clouds that is sponsored by HPE, as needed.
Smith added that it is good to see Ormuco hiring a channel executive who is as experienced as Dinallo to run the firm's partner program at this stage.
Previously, Dinallo had spent 11 years in channel roles at Parallels, and in 2016 was recognized as a CRN Women of the Channel honoree.
Ormuco has 20 channel partners globally, with a handful in North America, led by IIS as the largest North American partner, Dinallo told CRN. The company is recruiting partners in North America but is "not looking to sign 100 partners in the U.S. – we're looking selectively," she said.
In particular, Dinallo said that Ormuco is looking for a well-established partner in each region of the country, following the model of partnering with IIS, which focuses on the Northeastern U.S. The inaugural channel program features "very compelling" margins for partners, she said, though Ormuco isn't disclosing a specific figure. That includes "not only margins on the recurring monthly revenue of the software itself, but also margin on the installation," Dinallo said.
Additionally, the channel program features pre-built options for quick deployment of the Ormuco software; a partner-branded portal for billing and provisioning; discounts; market development funds; and flexibility around end-user pricing and billing. Ormuco is also providing onboarding and training programs, a partner portal for online demos, lead sharing, and access to support materials for sales and marketing.
Overall, "our top priorities right now would be recruitment and enablement of cloud service providers, ISVs, and resellers," Dinallo said.