Scaling With VARs and OEMs: Nexenta CEO Evan Powell (Part 6)

Sramana: You have mentioned that you incentivize your own sales force to ensure your partners success. Have you provided any incentives for the VARs?

Evan Powell: The more active our partners get the more we will co-sell with them. We will put up to 10% of the dollars that they sell which come to us will be put forward in a joint marketing campaign. Every VMWare Users Group we can get our hands on where we have a partner at we will co-sponsor with our sponsor. It is important to co-sale with them. My standard cliché is to step away from the white board and sell something because until you do that you do not know that you have a business. Customers will tell you, if you listen, what to develop. I don’t want to develop the coolest technology that nobody is quite ready to buy.

Sramana: How did your business ramp?

Evan Powell: Our first sales was in April of 2008. Our first sales person other than myself was hired in the first quarter of 2009. We are growing at 400% year on year. We estimate that partners will sell 300 million dollars of Nexenta based systems of which we are just the software component. You can think of us as being around a tenth of that.

Sramana: What has been your financing strategy with this company? You said you did some angel financing early on.

Evan Powell: We did raise about a fifth of the amount that we are selling this year. The capital we raised was important for us but with our business we have been able to break even multiple times. We have never missed a quarterly projection because of our sales model. Our model allows us to be extremely capital efficient. In our case growth is based on quality hires.

I also think that this is not a company where you want anyone to feel like they need to sell the company. Sometimes if you raise money too fast you can get pressure to potentially sell the company or to do something that is short term optimal, long-term suboptimal. Enterprise storage is the biggest single IT spend out there right now and we are re-shaping that space. It is a massive market. We always want to think 10 years out as opposed to the 5 years that VCs will think of.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Scaling With VARs and OEMs: Nexenta CEO Evan Powell
1 2 3 4 5 6 7