Arrow ECS adds Butterfly to Fusion as SaaS portfolio grows

Arrow ECS (ARW) has launched ‘Storage Fusion’, its first UK Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to allow its channel to sell low cost Storage Resource Analysis to large enterprise customers.
Later this month, it will also announce “Butterfly” as its second offering for IBM (IBM) partners to provide resource analysis on complex tape backup environments.

“30 percent of our business is in storage and SRM solutions typically cost a fortune,” explains Steve Pearce, managing director for Arrow ECS in the UK. “But lots of customers have storage problems and they need to do something about as they move to technologies like virtualisation.”

Although Pearce is “uncomfortable” pigeonholing its new Storage Fusion as pure SaaS, the technology allows partners to sell either a single scan and report or a block of service for a single one-off fee without any local equipment, software stack or long term financial commitment. 

Pearce envisions it as a realistic option for partners to offer the report ahead of any major storage consolidation or migration project to help with design and implementation. He then advocates subsequent post project reports to show improvements. “Once [partners and clients] have this level of data, it also opens a lot of additional possibilities,” he suggests through additional professional services.

The Storage Fusion service is still several thousand pounds per report but Pearce points out that the cost for a comparable in-house solution is 10 times the amount with a much longer implementation process. Pearce admits that SRA as a technology is not the easiest of sales but in a “pay as you go” format, it is much simpler proposition for the channel to pitch. “If it really doesn’t work, then we will refund it,” he quips.

However, Storage Fusion, developed by UK-based Storage Fusion Limited, has already been well proven and adopted by both Computacenter and Unisys with a roster of high profile customers. The developer has been working closely with Arrow ECS for the last few months to restructure the sales model to fit with channel distribution and to create supporting collateral for partners.