Kudos to Ron Croce, CRN Channel Chief for Two Years Running

Cirrus Data Solutions (CDS) is pleased to share that for the second year in a row, Ron Croce, VP Worldwide Sales and Marketing, has been named a CRN Channel Chief. The esteemed 2018 CRN Channel Chiefs list represents the top IT channel leaders who excel at driving growth and revenue through channel partners. Ron’s success reflects our channel partners’ success, which is a strategic goal for CDS.

CDS derives 100% of our revenue through the channel. In 2017, under Ron’s direction, CDS grew our channel partners by over 50%; CDS currently has 144 channel partners worldwide. A significant number of the channel partners working with CDS are generating revenue and many others have new storage projects that will result in future data migration needs with CDS. From inception, CDS has focused on delivering the best technology to the marketplace that would give our channel partners a competitive advantage. In a world where every day spent on a legacy storage architecture materially impacts budgets, CDS offers channel partners another tool in our competitive arsenal.

Early on in his career, Ron was told the secret to success is making your company easy to work with. In an innovative technology company, that expands beyond the basics of finance and administration. Under Ron’s leadership over the past year, CDS expanded the partner training and new partner certification programs produced by the technical enablement team. These programs enable our partners to become savvy in data migration and adept at utilizing CDS’s Data Migration Server (DMS) in a production end customer network. During the first level of certification, partners learn how to identify when a storage deployment requires an advanced data migration technology, while the second level of training focuses on qualifying the channel partners’ technical team to deliver CDS’ data migration tools in the end-customer’s network. CDS prides itself on standing beside our partners during customer engagements and are always readily available to lend a hand, as you can read about in this recent case study.

In 2017, Ron also focused on growing the CDS channel relationships through OEMs, such as, IBM, Pure, Dell EMC, HPE, etc. These storage innovators are now bundling CDS’ DMS into their storage proposals to ensure that end customers are able to move to their new environment securely without delay. Thanks to Ron’s passion for innovation, he never missed an opportunity to show a technology innovator how their solution could be enhanced with CDS. It has made CDS’ data migration tools one of the top products for data migration on the market today. Today, CDS is incredibly proud that whenever these OEMs are migrating data from third party vendors to their own storage solutions they always recommend CDS’ DMS.

Ron is also engaged in illustrating that the simplicity of the DMS adds a financial advantage for CDS’ partners. With our specialized training, partners have learned that they can work on multiple projects simultaneously using DMS. This equals more revenue for our partners, when the same resource can

have multiple projects going on concurrently with the assurance that the migrations will run smoothly without having to be onsite literally watching over the data migration.

Geographic expansion is another critical element in Ron’s strategy. CDS has seen tremendous opportunity in Europe over the last year. As a result, we have expanded our European operations to better support our European partners. (Stay tuned for an exciting announcement concerning Europe coming soon.)

CDS is incredibly proud of its accomplishments over the last year. Ron’s drive toward helping our channel partners grow and do more with CDS is a major reason for our success. We look forward to more success in the future as our channel partners continue to grow. The 2018 CRN Channel Chiefs list is available online at www.crn.com/channelchiefs. Ron’s interview is available here.