Wasabi Technologies execs on demystifying the storage sector for partners

Four years in the ANZ market Marty Falaro and Craig Stockdale have their eyes on enabling their partners.

Wasabi Technologies is on a mission to demystify storage for its partners as it continues its growth campaign in the Australian region.

It opened its doors in Australia nearly four years ago with a handful of employees, now it has 14 staff.

Over the 2025 period, Wasabi has grown its Australian arm 45 percent with 750 channels.

When they entered the market in 2022, there was still confusion and misunderstanding about Cloud-Object-Storage-as-a-Solution.

COO at Wasabi Technologies, Marty Falaro spoke to CRN Australia about how they have been on a mission to educate the market on storage.

“We have over 100,000 customers now, but because our focus is on channel, we've invested a lot of energy in in educating and enabling the channel to demystify what storage is, because it's not that mysterious. It's kind of boring,” he explained.

“But the channels think of it as like, ‘Oh my God. What is it? Where is it? How do I position it?’”

Wasabi ANZ managing director Craig Stockdale echoes Falaro’s sentiments telling CRN Australia everything they do is channel-centric.

“Everything we do is about enabling the channel so that they can be successful. It's our role to educate them, enable them, and make sure that they're heading in the right direction,” he said.

Read our full interview below.

CRN: You mentioned demystifying storage for the channel, what does that entail?

Marty Falaro: It's changed a lot. It's gotten less mysterious over the last few years. We started the campaign once we understood the business, which took us about a year and a half of doing it ourselves.

We invested a lot of money into building this partner network, channel programs, education and the portals and all the things that channels demand and expect.

If you're a storage VAR, you were used to selling somebody a Dell box or a NetApp appliance or QNAP, delivering that, setting it up, and that was your value add.

Early days, even in Australia, when, before Craig [Stockdale] arrived, we were thinking about Australia as early as probably 2020, we wound up opening our storage location there. When we do a new location, takes several million dollars worth of investment on our part.

We wanted to build channels, and we wanted to make sure that our organisation could explain what cloud storage was, which has become less mysterious, but in the initial time, if you sold a box, you didn't want to sell cloud storage, because it seemed to be the antithesis of what you were used to doing.

In recent times, within the last 12 to 18 months, as we moved into the physical security surveillance sector, where cameras are deployed all over the place.

Those manufacturers and the channel that serves them were selling boxes to store the video footage on, and the box would be in the police station, or it would be at the university, IT department. They've now recognised that it doesn't scale and there's too much complexity and opportunity to lose the archive video footage, and so that industry and its channel have embraced cloud storage. The IT side embraced it more quickly, because it's just storage and we take care of it.

There's no difference between you selling somebody a box and you using Wasabi, except you don't have to worry about standing up storage, we do it. You don't have to worry about security. We do it. All you have to do is sell it and pick the right amount of storage to make available for the use case.

The mystery has gone out of it in the IT sector first, and now in the security and surveillance sector next.

CRN: What are Australian partners asking for when it comes to cloud storage?

Craig Stockdale: Probably the most prevalent from customers that we hear at the moment is that ‘my object storage costs have gone through the roof’.

In 2025 we did a cloud storage index survey. We survey around 250 CXOs across the ANZ region annually, and 51 percent of those surveyed suggested they overrun their budget in 2024, and that 51 percent of that was spent on fees and not on capacity.

That's a major issue for a lot of customers in the marketplace. From a partner perspective, companies like MSPs, they're all about delivering an end-to-end service. They can see the value of adding Wasabi into their service offering, because it lowers their bill of materials, their cost base, and allows them to be more competitive in the market and to also make more margin.

In the reseller base, they're out there pushing cyber security assessments, and they're pushing different services to the market. Things like covert copy and having an immutable copy of your data in the cloud allows them to tick the boxes around privacy laws, storing, having an offsite immutable copy of that data, strengthening the customer security posture, and having an impact potentially on their cyber insurance policies by having that offsite immutable copy.

We're starting to see a raft of end-to-end solutions emerging from the both the resellers and the MSPs in how they go to market.

CRN: How will you use your partners to make inroads within the backup and recovery business?

Stockdale: It's scale. We've invested heavily in net new resources. Three years ago, there was three of us, now we have 14 staff members. We're making those investments in Australia.

Our go to market strategy, as Marty [Falaro] said, is purely channel. We've set up programs like our White Glove Partner Program to make investments and to help those resellers and MSPs better understand what the challenges are at a business level and how we can help them fulfill some of the solutions.

Understand what the problem is we're trying to solve and ensure that we work with them as subject matter experts to really build their dual register. We have a deal reg site where partners can be protected by registering their deals. We have all of the digital archives of all information and data around marketing programs.

Everything we do is about enabling the channel so that they can be successful. It's our role to educate them, enable them, and make sure that they're heading in the right direction.

Falaro: The investment in a partner portal with education that's built in, we have certification for the sales and the technical side of the house in our partners. We're constantly updating that marketing campaigns in a box, put your own logo on it.

If you don't have a marketing department, you can pretty much run a campaign using our materials with your name on it. Stuff like that is valuable to the channel.

CRN: What gets you excited about the Australian channel?

Stockdale: The thing I love about the Australian channel market is, interestingly enough, it's not a huge market. Everybody knows each other. It’s very much a close knit group of people. They're all competing against each other. There is a degree of needing to differentiate yourself in the marketplace.

But the thing I love about it is it's a mature industry in Australia, and it continues to innovate. And there is a lot of innovation that comes out of a lot of our partners and our channel ecosystems.

In that instance, that's played into the hands of Wasabi, where we can help partners be a little bit more innovative, differentiate themselves with a better solution set or offering where they can be much more aggressive in the marketplace, or they can make greater profits as a result. Honing in on the things that are important to the channel partner.

A lot of the people that work in our company now have had channel experience, so they sat on the other side of the fence and understand what is required by the channel partners and MSPs in the Australian market.

It's innovative, we love it, and we've invested heavily in it. It's been successful for us to date, as I said, growing 45 percent last year, that growth is being fuelled by that partner ecosystem, so we keep investing in that market.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.