Nasuni Channel Chief: ‘We Are Critical In Making An AI Strategy Easy’

‘You’re going to be able to smash AI through it in any way you want because it’s very accessible,’ Matt Grantham, Nasuni’s channel chief, tells CRN.

Nasuni has a revamped partner program designed to help reward solution providers investing in the vendor’s enterprise data platform to chase opportunities in creating hybrid cloud environments and growing demand for unstructured data management to bring artificial intelligence to life.

Matt Grantham, Nasuni’s channel chief, told CRN in an interview that although Nasuni doesn’t have an AI platform, “we are critical in making an AI strategy easy,” a powerful message resellers can bring customers.

“We’re going to unify the data,” said Grantham, whose official title is head of worldwide partner sales. “It’s going to be really easy to get to. And you’re going to be able to smash AI through it in any way you want because it’s very accessible.”

Nasuni Partner Program

Vincent Trama, chief revenue officer of New York-based Presidio–No. 21 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500–told CRN in an interview that Nasuni’s tools have helped his company rightsize clients’ environments between on-premises and cloud and optimize costs.

Common Nasuni use cases with customers include disaster recovery (DR) and ransomware defense.

“Cost optimization is one of the main things we’re going to market with, and Nasuni fits into that category,” Trama said. “We expect the partnership, and, quite frankly, the revenue to continue to grow.”

The Boston-based vendor, part of CRN’s 2024 Partner Program Guide, says its enhanced partner program brings a tiered structure and more resources for solution providers.

Nasuni’s “essential” tier is for solution providers who can resell the vendor’s wares. “Advanced” partners see an accelerated path to market for building out Nasuni practices. The program brings a value-based incentive model that rewards cloud-based certifications, go-to-market (GTM) strategies and software-centric capabilities–not just volume and revenue generation.

A new partner portal to go with the program offers automated registration and onboarding, training and certification resources, co-branding campaigns, a better market development fund (MDF) experience, tier visibility, synchronized organizational charts, account mapping and more.

In February, privately held Nasuni revealed that in fiscal year 2024, it grew revenue 26 percent and was profitable and cash flow positive. Its global workforce is about 600 people.

The vendor now manages more than 500 petabytes of total capacity with half of its customer base expanding deployments. Nasuni saw 600 expansions throughout fiscal year 2024, according to the vendor.

The vendor is valued at about $1.2 billion, securing a strategic, majority investment last summer led by Vista Equity Partners and joined by TCV and KKR.

Nasuni’s partner strategy has also included deeper integrations with other vendors. Nasuni recently launched an integration with Microsoft Graph connectors allowing for Nasuni data to commingle with data in SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft 365 and other offers by the tech giant with a single view of that data.

The vendor also made an integration with CrowdStrike available on the cybersecurity vendor’s marketplace for real-time threat detection and enhanced data recovery. The vendors promise to share actionable intelligence, strengthen data protection and minimize downtime after an attack through the integration.

Michael Sotnick, Nasuni’s senior vice president of business and corporate development, told CRN that the vendor is increasingly adding its offers to more cloud marketplaces and targeting customers with large unstructured datasets in manufacturing and energy plus video workloads in gaming, media and retail, for example.

“The Nasuni value proposition … allows our partners to confidently stand in front of the customer and navigate with them a data strategy that is really the underpinning to some of the, more further-reaching AI and analytics related efforts,” he said.

Nasuni solution providers have an opportunity to make “significant margin” with the vendor even with a short partnership history, Grantham said.

For resellers having a tough time transitioning to a cloud-first world and losing resale revenue to self-service cloud marketplaces, Nasuni “allows a ‘cake-and-eat-it-too’ situation where you can resell Nasuni in a cloud-first environment (and) capture margin while it’s still being transacted on marketplace with a zero impact on margin,” the channel chief said.

Nasuni’s platform resolving cost, performance, security and data silo problems with adopting cloud and AI strategies should entice solution providers, he said.

“Now I can have a very differentiated conversation that talks about a business outcome that impacts far deeper than IT,” he said. Nasuni “is not just a gateway to AI. It’s a gateway to AI responsibly.”