‘It’s probably one of the biggest announcements that we’ve ever made, or ever will make, because for the first time, Dell now has a cloud storage product to sell. This is hugely important to them because their customers sometimes say, ‘Hey Dell guys, I don’t really want to buy any more on-prem storage from you guys. I want to do my storage in the cloud.’ And then the customer moves to Amazon and Dell gets nothing. And if you asked Michael Dell who he sees is his biggest competitor and enemy in the marketplace, it’s not some other hardware manufacturer. It’s AWS,’ says Wasabi CEO and Co-founder David Friend.

Cloud storage provider Wasabi, which touts its ability to provide cloud-based data storage at a fraction of the cost of that of Amazon Web Services, Thursday unveiled a new strategic agreement to provide Dell with its first cloud storage offering.

Wasabi has been working on building its Dell partnership for over two years, which included a meeting between Wasabi CEO David Friend and Dell CEO Michael Dell, Friend told CRN.

“It’s probably one of the biggest announcements that we’ve ever made, or ever will make, because for the first time, Dell now has a cloud storage product to sell,” Friend said. “This is hugely important to them because their customers sometimes say, ‘Hey Dell guys, I don’t really want to buy any more on-prem storage from you guys. I want to do my storage in the cloud.’ And then the customer moves to Amazon and Dell gets nothing. And if you asked Michael Dell who he sees as his biggest competitor and enemy in the marketplace, it’s not some other hardware manufacturer. It’s AWS.”

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As Dell moves to start selling cloud storage with help from Wasabi, it has put in place an unusual sales compensation program, Friend said.

“Dell’s sales team gets 100 percent comp for selling Wasabi, which puts us in a small group of only a handful of Dell partners for whom sales the Dell sales team make can actually retire quota and bring full compensation for selling a product that isn’t manufactured by Dell,” he said. “We don’t know if there are any others like that. There probably are a few. But for almost the rest of the industry that partners with Dell, Dell’s salesforce gets 50 percent comp.”

With the relationship, over 60,000 worldwide customers of Dell’s Data Domain data protection technology can now add the Wasabi cloud as a built-in extension to those devices, Friend said.

“This idea of a hybrid of local storage and cloud storage has been something which I’ve been advocating for a long, long time,” he said. “If you’re backing up your servers, let’s say, and you have an outage and need to restore, you need that local copy because every second counts when you’re down, especially if you’re running a transaction system. … But if you’ve got a failure, you restore that most recent copy off that local device, and then if you need to find older backup, those are in the cloud.”

Data Domain comes with cloud tiering which automatically replicates data to the cloud as needed, and now that cloud can be the Wasabi cloud, Friend said.

“You never have to worry about your Data Domain device filling up and stop working because as it gets close to being filled up, it pushes the oldest stuff up to the cloud automatically,” he said. This is an architecture that I’ve been promoting really since the beginning of Wasabi, and finally Dell has implemented it and now we’re bringing it to market.”

The new relationship also means that Dell’s worldwide channel partners can all now sell Wasabi, either with a Wasabi purchase order or on a Dell PO to take advantage of potential Dell rebates, Friend said.

This is also a great way for partners to bring cloud storage to enterprise customers who perhaps were hesitant to buy from a smaller company like Wasabi despite the company already at an annual revenue of about $100 million, Friend said.

“But they’re very comfortable buying from Dell,” he said. “If they have a relationship with the Dell salesperson or partner, they can just buy Wasabi from Dell. This is the first time, as far as I know, that anybody has been able to buy a cloud product from Dell, and the Dell Salesforce gets their full commission on it. So it’s a big deal. And we now have an employee living at Dell whose job is to start training the Dell salesforce.”

Solution providers currently working with Wasabi cloud storage should not feel any adverse impact from the company’s new Dell relationship, Friend said. Wasabi currently gets most of its revenue via sale through a wide range of channel-focused storage and data protection technology such as Commvault, Veeam, Rubrik, or Arcserve, he said.

“A company like Veeam Software sells exclusively through the channel,” he said. “So a channel partner might sell Veeam’s data protection technology with Wasabi storage. And that’s the way the model works. We have a few OEM partners who actually embed Wasabi storage in their product, but the data protection vendors are just selling the backup. They’re not selling cloud storage. So customers are happy when the channel partner marries them up with Wasabi because the total solution is more competitive because of our much lower price than, say, Amazon. But if the channel partner wants to sell Veeam Software plus Wasabi through the Dell channel, that would not bother us.”

Prior to the Wasabi relationship, Dell did offer cloud storage it got when it acquired EMC, Friend said. However, Dell never turned that technology into a full modern cloud storage offering.

“What Dell has traditionally offered is not a multi-tenant, global public cloud,” he said. “They don’t have that capability. They can stand up their Dell PowerProtect appliances, but not a cloud. It’s really designed to be single tenant. And businesses can build their own private clouds to get the data offsite. But that’s not what Dell was looking for, because their customers are going off to AWS. And AWS doesn’t buy anything from Dell. Then the next thing that happens is the Dell salespeople lose account control.”