Soonr Launches File-Sharing-Service Channel Offensive

The Campbell, Calif., company, whose Soonr service powers AT&T's Backup and Go, is recruiting solution providers for its Soonr Success Partner program, which includes new pricing and additional storage.

"It's Dropbox on steroids," said Morris Northcutt, founder and owner of CloudEasy4, a Tacoma, Wash., cloud services provider that has been reselling the Soonr service for the past 18 months. "Dropbox is a good product, but it's a consumer product. You can clearly tell it was built for personal use. Soonr was developed for businesses. We have never had an outage or a breach. It's HIPAA-compliant with high encryption. It's nice to have a product geared for businesses."

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Soonr has gone to great lengths to provide a business-grade, highly secure service with geographic redundant data centers and a seven-year record of no data breaches. In addition to being HIPAA- compliant, the Soonr service is SSAE-16 certified, both checkoff items for corporate customers looking for business-class cloud services.

Northcutt said he has been impressed with Soonr's no-holds barred channel commitment. "It's a great high-margin channel program," he said, noting Soonr is one of his top partners. "They give you flexibility to bundle the service as you like."

The new higher storage offering with simplified pricing opens the door for CloudEasy4 to drive additional sales, Northcutt said. "It's a heck of a lot more storage," he said. "I had trouble sleeping last night thinking of how I can take advantage of this opportunity."

Under the new plan, Soonr Workplace Pro is priced $9.95 per user, per month for three users and up to 1 TB of storage. Soonr Workplace Enterprise is priced at $19.95 per user, per month for 10 users and up to 5 TB of storage.

The Soonr Success Partner program features 30 percent commission plus a 10 percent deal registration for the enterprise service, said Victoria Grey, chief marketing officer for Soonr. In addition, the company offers internal use licenses for 70 percent off the manufacturer's suggested retail price.

Soonr is targeting a variety of partners with an SMB to midmarket focus, including born-in-the-cloud solution providers and MSPs already providing Office 365 or hosted Exchange, said Grey. The company also is offering XChange attendees a free internal use license for the professional service with three seats for free with a signed reseller contract. The XChange offer expires Sept. 30.

Martin Frid-Nielsen, founder and CEO of Soonr and one of the holders of the original patent for file syncing, said the company's million-dollar-plus channel investment is aimed at attracting thousands of new resellers and marks a turning point for the company.

"We have had good technology for a while," he said. "It's time that we were no longer the world's best kept secret.. We are looking forward to leveraging the channel. It's an immediate win-win situation. The resellers are trusted advisers and they have customers already eyeing these kinds of solutions. And we are seeing a lot of growth already from our partners selling seats."

Soonr's business has been growing at a 500 percent clip over the past two years, Frid-Nielsen said. He said the company's highly secure, telecom business-grade capabilities is winning over solution providers and customers that are anxious to ensure their data is not being compromised in a cloud services, BYOD world. "What's happening is the data that is so essential to business is being stored in individual accounts and when these people leave the company, the data is walking out the door with them," he said.

PUBLISHED AUG. 19, 2013