Overland sees light at end of tunnel

Overland Storage (NASDAQ: OVRL) is publicly attempting to put the hard times of the last couple of years behind it, and is keen to reassure its partners that it's still a credible player in the data management space.
Andy Walsky, VP EMEA sales & marketing, Overland Storage says that despite the firm’s “rough patch”, it has come out the other side.
Overland made its name in tape, but suffered when the market began to fall off, resulting in financial losses and redundancies. However, the vendor came back with a series of moves last year, such as hiring a new management team that includes CEO Eric Kelly and VP worldwide of sales & marketing, Jillian Mansoff. There was also a second round of funding.
“We made huge changes to our operating model,” Walsky told Channel Pro.
Concerns
However, Walsky admits that Overland’s channel relationships have suffered: “Our partners had concerns about the company going forward. [They] wondered about the viability of the company.”
But, continues Walsky, a secondary injection of funds into the company should work towards reassuring concerned Overland resellers. “We’re reconnecting with partners; we want them to know they are fully supported. The company’s not going away.”
The vendor says that will rely less heavily on its traditional OEM business, and be more focused on building branded Overland products, such as its Snap Server NAS range it acquired from Adaptec in 2008.
Virtualisation partners
Walsky also says that Overland wants to recruit more partners for its new SnapServer SAN S2000 iSCSI SAN platform, launched this week. It is particularly looking for virtualisation resellers, as the platform integrates directly into the VMware management application and is certified to support Windows Hyper-V Server for Microsoft virtualisation deployments.
This week also saw a re-package the firm’s partner programme, re-naming it FastTrack.