How Zadara is giving VARs a fairer deal and power to deliver change

Are you feeling the frustrations of working with traditional hardware vendors? Ever decreasing margins? Lockout as vendors develop direct relationships with customers?  It can seem like traditional hardware vendors and cloud providers are undermining the value of Channel Partners with the current options.
  • In the world of traditional hardware manufacturers, the role of the value-added reseller (VAR) has traditionally been to sell to end-customers.
  • In exchange for fulfilling this role, VARs receive a margin of the sale price – albeit one that often shrinks over time, or completely in some cases.
  • The VAR sometimes provides services to complement the technology lifecycle.
  • With the advent of cloud and Opex consumption models this model has become dated and no longer delivers what customers need today.
  • The agenda of traditional hardware manufacturers can also introduce tensions such as direct fulfillment and deal registration conflicts which undermine the VAR’s value.
Our work with industry analysts indicates you are not alone in finding shortcomings in the traditional model and that there is a significant growth opportunity in the “as a service” delivery model.

This model is outdated and flawed, so Zadara is re-energising the VAR-vendor relationship.

Electric charge flowing around a circuit makes for one extremely flexible utility, capable of powering everything from the humble lightbulb to rovers on Mars. Many value-added resellers (VARs) wish for the same flexibility and scalability as you get with a utility like electricity in their IT infrastructure. With Zadara, it’s getting much closer.

As a VAR, your role is usually to enable big IT vendors to sell to end-customers. You sell the vendor’s solutions, but on very limiting terms. The vendor gives you a share of the sales margin, but the margin shrinks over time to almost nothing. Sometimes your vendor engages the customer directly, or through another VAR, because of registration conflicts. It’s frustrating, but that’s how it is.

But it doesn’t have to be.

What if you could…

  • Deliver technology as a utility as flexible as electricity, ready to serve your customers’ needs however their requirements evolve?
  • Sell infrastructure as a managed service on your own balance sheet, instead of reselling hardware?

Zadara is changing the VAR-vendor relationship.

Partnering with us means owning your customer relationships. It means a truly transparent relationship – no hidden charges. And it means offering infrastructure you can deliver, scale, and even change without pain or penalty.

Here’s how this transparency, and the ability to deliver technology as a real utility, is enabling VARs like you to become agents of change.

No more margin recovery

Have you ever experienced “margin recovery”?

It’s where a vendor offers a customer and VAR a healthy discount to secure their business. Then the vendor steadily raises prices throughout the relationship, so it can recover the margin it gave up when it courted you to “win the deal”.

The same kind of tactics are used in multi-year deals. As a VAR you’re rewarded well for winning a new customer. But over time, your relationship with that customer is eroded until the vendor eventually deals with them directly.

At Zadara, we’ve seen how this can lead to conflict and poor customer experiences. We want to help you grow, not squeeze you out of the picture, and we think full commercial transparency is part of the answer.

Real transparency

Dig into the details of the Zadara Partner program and you’ll see the benefits of complete commercial transparency. 

Instead of deal structures that erode your customer relationships, we:

  • Provide a standardized rate card for cloud compute, storage and networking services, which stays the same for the full term of your agreement
  • Honor the discounts we offered you at the start of our relationship, again for the full term of our agreement
  • Deliver virtually all Zadara Edge Cloud Services through partners like you
  • Help you win more customers with industry-leading services recognized by GigaOm, the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and top-rated customer reviews on G2

This is what we mean when we say you have full ownership of your customer relationships.

We’ve also made it easier for you to help end-customers deal with change, and that could mean more for your business than you think.

Become an enabler of change

When your customers’ business needs change, many vendors see dollar signs. New requirements mean selling a whole new solution.

Some vendors have created “as-a-service” offerings, but they aren’t much different from a traditional lease. The customer can’t change technologies flexibly or scale elastically without paying hidden costs.

Hyperscalers may offer more flexible solutions, but their services come with escalating costs like data ingress and egress. And when you resell public cloud services, many customers will eventually buy direct from the platform.

With Zadara you can finally offer true as-a-service infrastructure and become an enabler of change. When your customers’ needs change, grow, or shrink, you can:

  • Move them to new services and technologies – whether that is the latest and fastest flash storage, or smaller compute instances – with no penalty for you or them
  • Provide infrastructure on premises, at the edge, or in the cloud
  • Always provide 100% OpEx, fully elastic and fully managed infrastructure without hidden charges like data ingress and egress

This is how Zadara is making infrastructure almost as flexible a utility as electricity – and how we’ve redefined the role of the VAR.

Zadara Team

Zadara Team

Since 2011, Zadara’s Edge Cloud Platform (ZCP) simplifies operational complexity through automated, end-to-end provisioning of compute, storage and network resources.

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