Storage is sure a catty business. Seems to be a dogfight in every deal. We surely like our new relationship with Compellent Storage and their fluid data campaign. The product really sings! Features and ease of use seem to be unmatched elsewhere.
In case you are looking at Pillar as a solution, this is how they treated us as a partner when we chose to take on Compellent Storage as another vendor option in addition to our Netapp partnership. We sold about 9 Pillar systems for them to our own customers over about 14 months. You would think they would be happy with our performance. Their answer was to fire us as a partner the day we did a Press Release on our new Compellent partnership. Fact was, we needed replication for our customers and that feature was chronically late and absent from the Pillar feature set.
My statement was that whenever Pillar wanted to sell exclusively through Peak IP Solutions, Peak IP would exclusively sell Pillar. Well we all know that would never happen. In the end they fired us and sent the De-Authorisation Letter attached. The company is poorly run from the top. I even heard that Tako Ventures backed out of funding them and it is all Larry Ellison directly funding them now. With the acquisition of SUN, what is the life of this company now…?
- Doug
..... original email now deleted... it was here.
Pillar Data Systems requested that I delete the email they sent me deauthorizing us as partners. They stated it was proprietary information. I suppose publishing the email firing us as partners was a little bold.
The reality of the situation is, why would any company, especially one whom was said to be the number one partner in the Bay Area, fire a channel partner who is being successful with the product. Even if we were barely successful, we did have their logo on the back of our business cards, we worked with them to bring them into our customer base, we did a lot for them. They simply fired us for adding another product line to our storage solution base. Compellent.
Now, it is very awkward working with our customers who bought Pillar from us. I would do just about anything to move them to a Compellent solution or Netapp or even EMC... After we were "delisted," about $300K in additional storage systems, renewals and expansions were sold DIRECT to our customers by Pillar with no channel partner. Another partner was also introduced to a few customers but in the end they took the business Direct. We were unable to play. And now, we cannot support them. Awkward....
The most akward...., is that we sold one to my church. Yes, they are a big church and have a bunch of VM's, data, and video surveillance. Well, I can't support them now that Big Mike fired us through his ranks.
Hmmm... I remember a guy named Chip who was the head of Marketing there. He was supposed to bring film crews and writers to do case studies of our satisfied customers. Well, he never surfaced. All talk and no action. We were willing to do references and I made the calls to our customers to ask them to participate. They never showed up. Lots of time invested but Pillar never showed up.
This post is LONG OVERDUE! Pillar fired us about a year ago in August of '09. We truly love Compellent and our relationship there however. John Mallory and team are a great crew. The 100% support their partners and channel. The product is truly TOP TIER too. We bought one for our own use internally. Something I was always hesitant to do with Pillar. I am sure glad I never did that. Wow, what a waste that would have been.
Anyway, this replaces the email that used to live in this post. Sorry to have disturbed the Pillar Elite with that part of the message. If you are thinking about carrying Pillar as a Channel Partner, think again. BAD MOVE! I regret it as much as the day I sold my '73 Volkswagen Westfalia Camper Bus. Best car ever!
Cheers!
Doug
